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

I believe the Minister of State and Deputy Doherty have dealt with a fair amount of the technicalities of this. Deputy Doherty has put questions in front of the Minister of State. I hope he will reply to on the publication of reports and that general idea of transparency, which we obviously all welcome. Beyond that, as much as we all welcome this legislation, there is the question regarding the fact there are infringement proceedings by the European Commission, and we would welcome a general outline of the timeline and how we once again found ourselves in that set of circumstances.

The fact is we all want to see greater protection for customers and injured parties when insurers go insolvent. We could all detail multiple instances of reasons for having this and I think that is why we are all in support of the legislation to give provision to this directive. The setting up of the compensation body to compensate injured bodies is very welcome, as is anything that makes it easier for claimants to receive compensation following insurer insolvency. Instead of having to deal with the liquidators, they can engage directly with the Motor Insurers' Bureau and then receive compensation within three months instead of what can be a long, drawn-out process. This is obviously all very welcome.

I do not think it would come as any shock, and I imagine everyone who is here is going to talk about the fact, that while there have been strides taken, and I would say, to a degree, strides probably in some cases taken very late, in dealing with the whole insurance industry, the fact is not only was it done late but we have not necessarily seen the benefits of these. It is not the first time I have had an engagement with the Minister of State with regard to public liability insurance. I recall one of his former Government colleagues, the former Minister of State and Deputy Michael D'Arcy, when he had responsibility for this particular issue. I met him when I was a councillor with the former Deputy Gerry Adams, when he was a TD, and with Pelican Promotions. It was a company that did a huge level of work in inflatables, the sort of things people would have at every community group event, or at every communion and confirmation-type scenario. That was an issue that showed up how it was impossible for companies to get insurance where they were absolutely trying to do the best thing. It was my first indication of how the system and Government can fail in the sense that you would always think that, even if something is about to collapse or there is a particular issue in the industry, the system would prevail at the very end or even at the last minute. However, this proved to me that this was not the case.

I have to say that, at the time, I was quite impressed by Michael D'Arcy, particularly when he spoke about the fact, and I suppose a lot of people would have agreed with the sentiments he showed, that there needed to be huge moves taken regarding the duty of care piece. Obviously, we have seen in the past while the personal injury guidelines but his notion was that you could not necessarily trust that the insurers would follow suit. That is the scenario we are in at this time. That is why we would like to see Deputy Doherty's legislation, the Judicial Council (Amendment) Bill 2021, forcing the insurance industry to report to the Central Bank detailing how it has or, unfortunately, has not passed on savings to customers, euro for euro. That is the sort of transparency we need. I get that the Minister of State, the senior Minister and the Taoiseach and the Central Bank cannot direct the insurance companies but we really need to make sure there is transparency. We need to make sure there is absolute fairness with regard to it.

I remember speaking here before about the number of companies, if you want to call them that, community organisations, sporting organisations and community centres that were at times facing closure. The example I would use is where at one stage, a claim was put against Blackrock Community Centre, and suddenly its premium jumped to €11,000. Before any case and before any finding, it was €11,000.

Luckily, the people with responsibility for paying it were able to raise approximately €12,260 through a GoFundMe appeal which, obviously, would not be applicable across the board,. There was huge community buy-in. It just shows the abject disaster that is public liability insurance. My understanding at the time was that the Government had left it too late to make even the moves that have been made and that this was not a priority at Cabinet level. Many of the companies that offered public liability insurance, including for those in the childcare sector, left the market and people were left with one, or possibly two, companies to choose from. There was also a piece of work in keeping those insurance companies in the market. There have been some slight successes in getting more companies into this particular market. There is an issue as to how, eventually, we will operate a more European-wide market in which we get the benefits. Sometimes we do not necessarily get the benefits that are available to those other states, but we also have to get our own show in order.

The fact that we are in this case means we need to see more companies coming in and ensure they are coming in to offer a fair, sustainable and operable service to companies, community organisations and businesses. We all know the issues in public liability insurance through the years. While this is something we need to see, we also need to accept that motor insurance was an absolute disgrace at one point and we still have not seen the necessary savings in that field.

The moves taken are necessary, but some of them are late. This just needs to be done better and more quickly. We also need to make sure we find the means to keep insurance companies honourable and truthful and ensure they offer a service at a sustainable rate. Currently, all we are seeing are increased premiums and increased profits and that is not in any way acceptable. The only term I can use to describe this is unsustainable.

I and other Members have previously spoken about the issues affecting the inflatable industry, outdoor event companies, people involved in tourism and other industries. If we want to sustain the entire community, voluntary and sporting sector and all the rest of it, we have a huge piece of work still left to do.

In the time I have left, I wish to speak to an issue I raised with the Minister of State previously and with the Taoiseach this week. I was at a briefing run by Dundalk Chamber of Commerce in the Ballymascanlon Hotel on cross-Border workers and employers. Huge issues still exist in this regard, whether we are talking about redundancy payments, pension lump sums, tax relief on pensions, contributions for cross-Border workers or social insurance benefits. Significant changes are occurring across the board. Remote working, in particular, is an issue. While we had obvious difficulties and worries for workers in the context of redundancies at PayPal, when it became a complete 100% remote-working centre, it had a number of Northern employees, due to the fact it was based in Dundalk. For taxation purposes, PayPal had to create its own Northern set-up, or its own “UK set-up” as it would term it, although that is not a phrase I would particularly use. Major international and multinational companies have the capacity to do that but that sort of setting up of dual-jurisdiction operations is not viable or operational for small outfits. I spoke to the Taoiseach about this issue. There needs to be engagement. The Northern Executive is up and running, with Mr. Conor Murphy as Minister for the Economy and Ms Caoimhe Archibald as Minister of Finance. Mr. Paddy Malone has spoken to the Minister of State about this and he brought it up when Ms Michelle O’Neill was in Dundalk recently. There must be agreement across the Border in respect of operations like. We will probably have to deal with the British Government on it, which might be easier following the UK general election.

See this speech in context