Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

On Monday this week, Fettercairn community and youth centre in my constituency announced that it has had to cancel its summer projects for this year because of the extremely high, unaffordable insurance costs it faced. That story is replicated around the country, resulting in a crisis for community groups, young people and families everywhere. The events committee in Fettercairn said that it has exhausted all avenues but found that insurance costs were at an all-time high, leaving no option but to cancel this year's summer project. These summer projects are non-profit events and it is a non-profit organisation designed to give children and young people a chance to enjoy themselves for a few weeks of their summer holidays through visits to water parks, adventure centres, working farms and other activities.

It was an important part of the summer for the community in Fettercairn for decades but it is gone this year because of the cost of insurance. Obviously, people hope it will be back again next year but, if we do not get a grip on this crisis, it will not be. It is a great loss to families and children in Fettercairn and this situation is replicated right across the country.

It is entirely unacceptable that the profit motives of private insurance companies determine whether ordinary people and their children get to enjoy summer activities. To add insult to injury, the fact that the summer project in Fettercairn cannot go ahead comes hot on the heels of the closure of the Fettercairn Youth Horse Project in the same community for the same reason, insurance costs. This is another project that has been an invaluable part of the community for 22 years. It has been of enormous value for thousands of young people and adults, many of whom have complex and additional needs. It is closed completely at present because it cannot get the insurance it needs.

This entire debate and all of the examples we are hearing regarding the impact the insurance market is having on community groups in Fettercairn and across the country again demonstrate why we urgently need to break with the model of for-profit insurance and why we need a State insurance company to provide insurance as an essential public utility on a progressive, not-for-profit basis that takes account of people's and communities' ability to pay. Such a system of State insurance would provide the cover needed to ensure that these and many other community projects can serve their communities unhindered by the profit motives of insurance companies. The underlying assumption behind many of the so-called insurance reforms of recent years is that increasing transparency will increase competition and that this will inevitably lower costs. This flies in the face of our past experience, which shows that the real result of increased competition is an intensified cycle of boom and bust. Put simply, we cannot leave the insurance industry to profiteers. It is too important. The rights of the community in Fettercairn and communities right across the country are too important to leave to the capitalist market. Insurance should be run as a public utility in public ownership and as a service for people rather than as an extortion racket for insurance companies' investors and owners.

The whole issue highlights the lie that the model of free market capitalism is somehow efficient. For whom exactly is it meant to be efficient? It is not efficient for the workers who have to spend time every year shopping around for all of the varieties of insurance they need and looking at difference insurance products to try to find the best possible deal. It is not efficient for older people who may not use the Internet and who are therefore left vulnerable to being ripped off without any knowledge of the rip-off being perpetrated upon them. It is efficient only for the insurance companies, which utilise the mass of information available to them to target people and to maximise their profit. That mass of information should instead be available to our society as a whole and used to benefit ordinary people rather than to rip people off. Decades of history in respect of both the insurance market and the banking crash should be all the evidence we need of this.

Even the deputy governor of the Central Bank acknowledged during a meeting of the Joint Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach we had a number of years ago that presuming that encouraging more competition will lower costs is an act of faith and relies on the prior existence of very high profits in order that "new entrants will come in and drive down premium rates". Rather than endlessly waiting for the invisible hand of the market to be freed to work its magic, the solution is for the State to nationalise the insurance industry to provide affordable insurance to car owners, homeowners, community organisations and small businesses as an essential public utility. A progressive, non-profit basis would mean taking account of people's ability to pay and ending the systematic discrimination against young people, those on low incomes and working-class communities. That is the single most radical reform of the insurance industry that is needed if we are to end the crisis facing the community in Fettercairn and other communities across the country.

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