Gerard Craughwell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

No, I will not name him. If one goes to buy health insurance in the morning, one can pick any specific grouping that has a special deal and decide to be part of that. Why is it not possible to do the same with car insurance? We hear of youngsters who buy cars for €2,000 and are asked to pay €5,000 insurance. We then ask ourselves why there are uninsured drivers on the road?

I heard a very interesting debate recently about an apprentice whose mother was complaining that he could not drive alone on his provisional licence and he had a long way to go to work. I understand the problem but I do not agree with her point. The bottom line is that a learner driver should not be in a car on their own. Where learner drivers or uninsured drivers are found on the road in their cars, the car is a lethal weapon and should be taken off them on the spot. That would cause problems in rural Ireland but those problems are nothing to the problems of a family who lose a loved one because an inexperienced driver takes a corner too fast or because a car crashes, killing the driver.

I accept Senator O'Donnell's point on legal fees. However, we must also be aware that many, many clients when they go to a solicitor - not all solicitors, I hasten to add - to represent them at the Personal Injuries Assessment Board, PIAB, are told that the solicitor can get them a better award. This leads to the nonsensical four and five year delays where the client of the solicitor and the insurance company engage a plethora of medical professionals to carry out medical assessments maybe ten times between the time the claim is lodged and the time the claim is settled. However, 70% of claims are settled without ever going inside the door of a court. It is time we stopped the nonsense. There is no reason a personal injuries claim cannot be settled within a year if the parties to it are going to settle.

I recall an organisation down in Senator O'Donnell's country that sent a letter to every solicitor within a 100 mile radius and told them that if a solicitor took on a no foal, no fee case against that organisation, it would fight that solicitor to the Supreme Court if necessary. This killed off all the nonsensical claims overnight because nobody was prepared to chance bringing a no foal, no fee case all the way to the Supreme Court. One had to be damn sure of one's grounds before taking such a case.

There are spurious claims and they need to be weeded out. In the case of those who are genuinely injured, however, we need to expedite the claims process to get them whatever compensation they need. Compensation is not paid out willy-nilly in this country. People have to prove their case. The notion that one has to wait four years to do it does not make sense. If somebody goes to the PIAB, the board values his or her injury at €20,000, the claimant goes to court and is offered less than that, then that is what he or she gets. A very strong case would have to be made - I do not wish to tie the hands of the Judiciary - to get a valuation higher than the PIAB award.

I am delighted to see the appeals system is in place. I agree with Senator O'Donnell that the appeals system has not resulted in reduced policy figures. That is something that we need to look at.

I will finish on the issue of social responsibility. This morning I brought up the issue of first responders who act as first aiders in rural Ireland. The first case that arose was in Donegal. First responders were informed by their car insurance company that if they are using their car to respond to an emergency call out, they are not insured. To cover emergency call-outs, the insurance company looked for a premium on top of the premium. That is just milking the system. These people are prepared to give up their time voluntarily to their community by, for example, bringing a defibrillator to a person lying on the street. All of a sudden they are going to have to pay a price for it.

That caused me to look into the situation with regard to county councillors doing their duties. A county councillor may very well find that he or she is not covered if he or she has an accident. If that councillor explains that he or she is a county councillor and was en routeto visit a constituent in Bruff when the accident occurred, the insurance company can claim that the councillor was not on private business in his or her private car but rather was on a business trip and should have informed the insurance company of this.