Eoghan Murphy (Dublin Bay South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

On the Deputy's final point, we are looking at the issue of taxi drivers. We are meeting with every interest group that we can, either in the plenary session where we met with the hauliers earlier this morning as well as representatives of the car rental companies, or with taxi drivers, with whom we are meeting tomorrow, I think, or possibly later in the week. I am not going to be led by the industry. One of the big problems we have at the moment is transparency from the industry as to exactly what is happening, be it in relation to the claims process, the cost of claims or how they are calculating premiums. We are trying to get that information at the moment. What we are identifying through our plenary meetings and sub-groups are some honest brokers who are willing to share with us their information in an objective way so that we can get a proper sense of the picture ourselves. We will use that information to try then to build consensus around what the actual problems are and use that information to build consensus around what the solutions might be. Transparency will be the core of it as well as getting the information out into the public domain. I also have a fear that the lack of transparency is creating problems when it comes to competition and I have raised that with the Competition Commissioner myself.

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