Ruairí Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

As have I said previously, I welcome any news regarding any new players coming into the market. Obviously, we need them to come into the market and then offer something that is fair and reasonable. I think it was the president of the European Confederation of Outdoor Employers who spoke about what we are dealing with at this point in time as being very much an Irish phenomenon. An example was given in Portugal of €400 public liability insurance for a company with a turnover of €50,000. We really need to be getting into that sort of bracket.

What I heard from the Minister of State is that there is ongoing engagement. Am I to expect that there will be an improvement on premiums when we get the duty of care legislation finished? Of the insurance companies which were looking to come in regarding public liability insurance, are we fairly sure from the engagement with them that we will see an improvement and something that is viable? Has there been engagement with the likes of Brendan Kenny, Peter Boland and others regarding the difficulties that they represent? We really need to make sure we are not dealing with the madness of the issue I brought up before with the community centre in my own local area having to raise over €12,000 through GoFundMe. That, obviously, is not sustainable on a year-by-year basis.

At this time, there are a number of reforms being brought through. I can easily say that all of this should have happened a lot earlier. We would all accept it should have. We have reached an absolute crisis period, so we need to make sure that this done absolutely swiftly and it would probably have been a lot easier if we had not created a set of circumstances where some of these insurers left. However, the pressure has to be put on them. I understand the constraints of the Government. However, after introducing the necessary reforms, followed by engagement, we then need something that will actually work for the SMEs. The tourism industry and all the other related sectors require it.

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