Feargal Quinn (Independent)

It is difficult to follow some people and certainly not easy to follow Senator Norris. I will try to squeeze a lot into my five minutes. I too congratulate the Competition Authority on its report. However, it is important to point out that the report deals with only one aspect of the problem.

I wish to touch on four particular aspects of the report. Four interlocking factors apply to the high cost of insurance. The first is the number of claims, whether genuine or false. We have done something about this through road safety and safety in the workplace campaigns and through attacking the "compo" culture. I congratulate those responsible on the actions taken in this context, particularly against fraud which will shortly be a criminal offence and the recent decisions by a number of judges to award costs against claimants, which did not happen previously.

My company had a case where somebody claimed against it and the judge decided to award costs against the claimant. The judge felt it was not worthy of allocating costs which has not happened before.

The second issue is the cost of settling claims, about which we can do something. However, the legal profession has come to rely so much on the compensation culture that it has a vested interest in maintaining it. We have to do something about that. It is almost a case of a gravy train that has to be derailed if we are to be successful because so many lawyers have come to depend on it to a large extent.

In a recent case we had 11 people representing us in defending ourselves. They were not all legal experts, some were engineers and doctors. On the day the case was due to be heard, they arrived at the High Court at 10 a.m. to find they were 46th in line. The case was not heard and they left at 4 p.m. The claimant had a similar number of people representing him. The case came closer to being heard, but the same thing happened the following day and this went on until the fifth day. This group of people stood around for five days from 10 a.m. until 4 p.m. There were ten or 20 others waiting for the case as well, which eventually took place on the sixth day. The State should provide more High Court judges as they are badly needed.

The third issue relates to the insurance industry itself. As the report points out there are many niche markets within the overall industry where there is only one supplier. There is no competition in a number of areas. Many people think insurance companies make excessive profits and their protests to the contrary have little weight in view of the secrecy in which insurance companies indulge and, to some extent, the way they have been caught out misrepresenting the true facts of the situation. We must do something about this.

Reference was made to brokers' commission. I have a hang-up in regard to my own business about the way architects are encouraged to spend more on buildings. If an architect has a choice between a wooden or gold door handle, he gets paid more if can manage to coax the client to choose the gold one. My approach to this is to negotiate with the architect, which is not easy, to try to convince him that the less he spends on the building the more he will get paid. That is in contrast to what normally happens. As Senator MacSharry stated in regard to insurance, the more expensive the policy the more commission the broker gets. Let us see if we can introduce a "wooden door handle" policy in this area. It will not be easy to achieve all that is set out in the report, but we need to tackle it.

The fourth part was referred to by a number of people, which is the part the customer can play in terms of increased personal responsibility. As Senator Norris indicated, no matter how difficult, it is up to the customer to raise issues and we have to ensure this happens. The emergence of insurance customers as a strong lobby group is a good thing, as exemplified by the setting up of the Alliance for Insurance Reform. I am a member of this group so I know something about it. This lobby group has achieved results in the past two years and will probably not be needed in future if it achieves what it set out to do. If nothing else, it sent a clear message to the insurance industry that it has squeezed the customer far enough and for long enough and now it must put its house in order so as to avoid the consequences.

I commend the report of the Competition Authority, but I stress that this is a problem with many facets. The insurance sector is bedevilled by problems and we must resist the temptation to rush off in one direction or another. It is vital to attack the problem on a number of different fronts. In that way alone can we succeed in removing what has become a real cancer in our economy and a barrier to future economic growth. This has gone on for far too long, but it has been tackled in the past couple of years as the Government listened to what was said. I commend the report because I believe we can do far more than we are doing.