Matt Shanahan (Waterford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

We all know how important a subject this is across our communities and especially for business owners. The Alliance for Insurance Reform was before the Joint Committee on Enterprise, Trade and Employment recently. We discussed many of the problems of which the Minister of State is well aware and has covered recently. When will the duty of care legislation be published? When will it be enacted? More importantly, when will it commence? Can we expect that to happen soon? I know the Minister of State has been approached by a number of lobby groups that have told him how important this is because of the amount of cases that are pending and, unfortunately, the number of cases is rising, not falling.

A number of personal injury cases in the Circuit Court were reported to have escaped the PIAB process, as the Minister of State knows. Judges in those cases made awards that were well outside the judicial guidelines. We had thought we had closed out that problem but obviously we have not. There are some reasons cases exit PIAB and go to the courts but as was highlighted in a newspaper yesterday, the increases are significant. It is not the case that the person bringing the case gets a whole lot more in compensation but rather that the legal fees become stratospheric. How does the Minister of State propose to properly close out this issue? How is he going to get judges to observe the judicial guidelines that were agreed for injury awards? How is he going to stop lawyers from trying to take cases to the Circuit Court rather than going through the PIAB process? Perhaps in his summation the Minister of State will discuss some of those issues.

A case that was mentioned in a newspaper yesterday involved an employee of an insurance company who made a fraudulent claim that they were in a vehicular accident and it turned out they were not. It was found in the courts that the person concerned was not in an accident. The case, if you like, collapsed, but the judge made no finding for costs. In other words, rather than awarding costs against that person, who was essentially committing perjury, the judge let the matter lie so that the insurance company would pick up the cost. This is a significant problem in the insurance industry all the time. If people are going to bring bogus claims, there must be some sanction and grounding within the Judiciary to award costs against such a claimant and not to have the costs put back onto those who carry insurance. The reason it is being done is because otherwise nobody gets paid. It is easy to put the burden back onto the insurance companies, which means the cost automatically goes back onto the insured. Perhaps the Minister of State will respond to that point.

I was recently approached by a restaurant owner who had a claim of discrimination made against him through the Workplace Relations Commission, WRC. The discrimination involved related to an individual who came into his premises and requested to use the toilet. This happened when mask-wearing was required and the restaurant had a mask mandate. All the customers and staff were masked. The person concerned was unmasked and when asked to wear a mask, they said they did not need to because they had a medical exemption. When asked for that medical exemption, the person said there was no need for them to provide it. Management told the person it was the policy of the restaurant not to allow access to the toilets unless customers were wearing a mask. The person then left. The person videotaped the whole conversation on their phone and then went to the WRC which proceeded to bring a case on the grounds of discrimination.

There are a number of these cases pending. They are collapsing, but what if this gentlemen had taken the advice given him, which was to engage a senior counsel and a barrister at a cost of probably €10,000 to €12,000 to answer that case, which was an absolutely spurious claim? I ask the Minister of State, through his office, to have a word with the WRC and ask it to implement some kind of filtering system around discrimination. Surely these cases should never get to court and should not be oppressing hard-pressed business owners who are finding it hard enough to make ends meet.

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