Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

For the record, it is not just me who is saying the Government is sitting on its hands with regard to insurance reform and that insurance reform is dead in this country. It is the representative organisations of small businesses which are paying these massive premiums and which are being put out of business that are saying this. It always interests me that Fine Gael likes to give the impression that it is the party of small business yet it stands over the distorted market that exists. It is interesting that the Minister of State said that it is not his fault but the fault of the insurance companies.

The insurance companies operate under the legislative environment the Minister of State creates. He is unwilling to take on the vested interests, and I will give him one example of this. He is unwilling the deal with the legal lobbies. One way in which he could do so would be to deal with the caps on damages. He mentioned how shocking it is that people with soft tissue injuries can get massive payouts on claims. In his own words, however, when talking to some of these representative groups, his view was that the average payout for soft tissue injuries should perhaps be reduced from €30,000 to €20,000. This is outrageous.

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