Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú) | Oireachtas source

For how long have we been talking about insurance in Leinster House and the Dáil? How many years have passed in which Private Members' Bills, motions, discussions, questions and hot air have been produced en masseon the issue of insurance in Ireland? What level of actual reform has happened in the intervening time? One of the most frustrating things about being an elected representative in the Dáil in the past ten years is comparing the level of conversation about the issue of insurance with the actual reform that has happened. Any insurance reform in recent years that has come from Fianna Fáíl or Fine Gael has been absolutely minimal. There is a reluctance and a resistance within those two parties in terms of tackling this particular sector.

I laugh when I hear people talk about Fine Gael being the party of the free market. The fact of the matter is that Fine Gael is the party of the dysfunctional market throughout Irish society, in market after market.

I could mention the beef, housing or insurance industries. Those industries are absolutely dysfunctional and there is nothing free about how they function whatsoever. Fine Gael has stood over the dysfunction in the insurance industry for years, at a massive cost. The instinct among Fine Gael representatives at the moment, especially around insurance and those other sectors I mentioned, is a laissez-faireattitude. There is an instinct in those political parties to sit on their hands and not interfere with those sectors, even if it is to reform them so they operate properly. As a result, we had a situation whereby hundreds and thousands of businesses were on the edge of existence before the pandemic hit as a result of price gouging by insurance companies. Businesses were unable to function. Everything else in those businesses was working okay. They had good customer relationships, products, marketing and communications and they were turning decent turnovers. The price hikes that happened within the insurance industry were eye-watering. I know of businesses in my own constituency whose insurance one year cost €2,000 and was then hiked up to €15,000. Other businesses saw premiums that cost €30,000 hiked up to €150,000. At the same time, the Government stood idly by and would not interrupt that behaviour.

The subject of today's Bill is to address an idea that turns business loyalty on its head. The current regime says that the more loyal a customer is to an insurance company, the more that company will profiteer from the customer and the more the company will gouge from the customer. Insurance companies take advantage of older people and make sure they take more money out of the pockets of those people. As a result of that, we have seen insurance companies make enormous profits over the past number of years.

I pay tribute to Mr. Peter Boland and the Alliance for Insurance Reform. Sometimes success has many fathers and many people have claimed ownership of reform in insurance here today. The truth of the matter is that people such as Peter Boland have done considerable work around the country to try to bring this issue to the centre of the political debate and make sure that it is heard. I pay tribute to people such as Peter Boland.

Aontú has been holding public meetings around the country and raising this issue, year after year. Along with our colleagues in the Regional Group, we brought about the Private Members' Perjury and Related Offences Bill, premised on the idea that perjury should be illegal in courts. That is something that the Government would not tackle at the time.

There was, thankfully, a recent High Court win for businesses, especially pubs, relating to business interruption insurance. I invite Deputies to think about that as an example. An insurance company took money from pubs and was not willing to pay them when the issue of business interruption arose. It is incredible that FBD Insurance is today looking to shut down the Financial Services and Pensions Ombudsman from investigating cases that have been brought to that office. A consumer protection body looking to be shut down by a private insurance company is absolutely scandalous.

On 20 February, a decision will be made regarding guidelines for payouts in the future. I hear that the judges are mobilising against it and I caution the Government not to go down that route. Irish payouts are already out of sync with international payouts in a range of areas and there need to be guidelines.

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