Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Independent)

When the debate concludes, there will still be many unanswered questions and that is a dangerous way to proceed. Bills will drop through people's letter boxes following the Bill's enactment with a levy on them. That will then result in the same reaction a similar measure produced in the 1980s. I recall the failure of PMPA and the constant reminders in my bank statements year after year that I was paying a levy to bail out a private company. The credit union movement has done good work assessing the amount of disposable income available to households. A significant number of households have a tiny amount of disposable income and they are cutting out costs such as home insurance. The difficulty is that a levy such as this will push those who are on the brink over the edge.

Individual policyholders will pay for this and I do not understand how history is repeating itself. I recently looked back over newspaper reports from the 1980s and 1990s. Reference was made to administrators and so on. A Fine Gael-Labour Party Government was in power in the mid-1990s and it is interesting that the Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation is present because his brother reported to the House on the issue at the time. The PMPA administrator estimated in 1994 that the company could cease to be dependent on the compensation fund based on an existing annual 2% levy within a certain number of years. Each family paid on average £100 in insurance levies. PMPA was estimated to have a shortfall of £200 million. Doing even a rough assessment one could say that over the lifetime of the levy fund for this insurance company alone it will be somewhere in the region of €400 per family. It was interesting that the Insurance Corporation of Ireland, ICI, liabilities were not known. So much of what is happening now is history repeating itself. Asked at a press conference if the State was not simply baling out a private company, the then Minister for Finance, Mr. Dukes, stated that the Government was insuring against major disruption in the insurance market. The tone was the same against ICI in that if the Insurance Corporation of Ireland, a wholly owned subsidiary of Allied Irish Banks, had gone into liquidation, that could have had consequences for the bank itself. It is a pity it did not. They were saying that a bank would have an inability to borrow if it was exposed in this particular way and that if a wholly owned subsidiary of the bank collapsed, the terms on which the bank itself could then borrow money could be immediately affected. The same threatening language was used then in terms of trying to rush legislation through and creating a sense of fear and insecurity. Clearly, the workers in Quinn are being used as a softener to rush this Bill through the House to ensure there is some certainty about their jobs.

The key point is how this keeps happening. Why were there not adequate funds in this insurance fund? My understanding is that insurance companies employ actuaries who do assessments and make sure these things can be avoided, yet that industry is the one we are talking about.

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