Brian Hayes (Dublin South West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I want to be clear about what I and my officials have been engaged in for the past year and a half. As I have stated repeatedly, we have been sitting down with the insurance sector to find an agreement: first, that where we do work, such as major capital schemes up and down the country, the insurance sector would understand that the standard of such work reaches a minimum threshold of a one-in-100-year event; second, that such data will be transferred to the insurance sector in such a way that it can understand that such work has been completed and it has confidence in the work that the OPW has stood over or that has been contracted by other authorities on behalf of the OPW; and third, that the insurance sector can communicate that to its members so that there is clarity about the standard of that work. It is a memorandum of understanding. It is a voluntary agreement between two parties: on behalf of the State, this party; and PLCs. Private entities in their own right, these insurance companies can come and go from the Irish insurance market as they choose and can decide to insure what they want. In the great majority of cases, as the Deputies will be aware, the insurance companies have the information ahead of the State. They have had the information for years. They know where the flood risks are and they know the local authorities that have been building on flood plains as well.

Agreement has been the objective of the exercise and I want to bring that to a conclusion. I am not standing in its way. I am not the person who is preventing this happening. It is a matter now for the insurance sector to agree and I appeal to it to agree. I appeal to them to accept that the memorandum is a sign of good faith on the part of the State to prove to them that the State has committed many millions of euro in funding on behalf of the Irish taxpayer - €390 million in the course of the past decade - for the purposes of flood defences. The objective of the exercise is that when we get to the end of this process they will at least accept that the work that has been done by the State reaches that standard. We cannot then compel them to insure people and I never said we could. Despite the misinterpretation by some, I never said that. What I want to do is have that agreement in place.

If others are talking about a State indemnification scheme for insurance, that is a wider issue that involves many in government, much more senior than I. I would suggest to my colleagues opposite, if they are arguing for that on this complex issue where the liability to the State is a multiple of billions of euro, which may well determine the amount of liability that the State can cover, that we need to have that debate. That is what I was referring to yesterday on "Prime Time".

My objective is to get the memorandum through so that everyone agrees what we have done and the standard is there, which will at least provide some opportunity for people to get flood insurance cover. If, however, commentators are looking for some centralist or corporatist approach to this by way of a State indemnification scheme, they need to say how much that will cost, how much it will increase insurance premiums and the total potential liability, because if they are saying so, that is what it involves.

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