Rose Conway Walsh (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I want to raise the issue of dual pricing. I welcome the Central Bank's decision to do a review on dual pricing within the insurance industry, particularly for motor and home insurance. I commend my colleague, Deputy Pearse Doherty, on the work he has done in raising awareness of this issue. I am firmly of the belief, even though the Central Bank will not admit to this, that the reason it is doing this review now is because of the Deputy's work on exposing issues in the insurance industry. I refer to what the industry is doing regarding dual pricing and how it is using the information available to it. The data available can be data gathered by the insurance companies in the first instance, data gathered from store cards or data secured from social media. As an Oireachtas and Seanad, we have a job of work to do to make people aware that when they click something on social media or whatever it might be or sign up to a store card or anything else, they are giving away data and that those thousands upon thousands of items of data about themselves are being used against them. In the insurance industry it is being used against them to extract more money from them. If I and one of my colleagues were of the same risk in terms of insurance, we would find one is charged more than the other depending on the items of information that have been analysed. We must be aware these analytical tools are becoming increasingly more advanced all the time. I would like the Minister to come into the House for a full discussion on that issue. It is not only confined to the insurance industry. People are particularly vulnerable. They are being exploited left, right and centre because they are not being protected in respect of the data that is being used against them.