Mr. Eoin McCambridge:

I will have a stab at responding to that question if I may. Reference was made to the prevention of claims but in fact the PIAB only handles 10% of the claims and something like 20% of them make it to court. I might not be correct in my statistics but up to 80% of cases are settled in between. In my personal case my understanding is that insurance companies are reluctant to defend, first, because of the costs of defending cases. We raised that under the heading of consistency. When cases go to court the judgments seem to be quite random. There seems to be a lack of consistency in judgments. Again, insurance companies are very reluctant to go to court because it costs so much. That is one of the reasons they push for settlements. That is what happened in our case, whereby the insurer pushed to settle rather than defending. Even though the company felt there was a case to defend it was very reluctant to go to court because of the costs.

The other issue in addition to prevention is that when a case gets to court even if the insurer wins the case it is very rare that the costs will follow the plaintiff. It is generally defendants who seem to have the costs awarded to them. Again, it is one of the reasons we said we would really like to see a change. I am sorry if I am getting my sections mixed up but I think it is in section 26 that where a judge dismisses a case, it is just dismissed but nothing happens and the person walks away. That is why we are looking for an automatic referral under section 25 that the Garda would get involved and there would be a prosecution. We have to start preventing such claims. If someone hurts himself or herself on my premises, I, as a businessman, want to look after that person but I am afraid to do anything because he or she could claim for €70,000, €80,000 or €90,000 for hurting a finger. It is bizarre because the cost of the claim could be relatively small. When one starts to add in all the costs, however, it gets out of control and that is reflected in my premium. The system is very dysfunctional and, as a layperson, it is very hard to understand what is going on. We certainly need to prevent those kind of small, misleading - not necessarily fraudulent - but exaggerated claims.