Pat Casey (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State to the House. He is becoming a regular visitor. I believe he will be back again next week.

This is another piece of the insurance reform jigsaw that is being put in place. It is good to see that there have been no amendments and that the Dáil has more or less recognised it for what it is doing and has accepted that. However, we still have a long way to go within the insurance sector to make additional reforms to get it to where we realistically need to get it.

Any of us who have worked in business or who run a business always reward our loyal customers but the insurance industry behaves in the opposite manner. The more loyal one is, the more penalised one gets for being a loyal customer. In relation to one aspect of this, the price walking, which is probably a new terminology, it is good to see that this is included in the Bill and the Central Bank will have a role as soon as this is enacted to try to address this.

There is a generation of people out there who are not used to shopping around, who are not used to going on the Internet to secure a better offer or who are not used to picking up the phone and spending 15 or 20 minutes trying to get a better price. They were reared with being loyal to a brand that they trusted but that trust is no longer coming from the insurance side. It might be coming from the customers' side but it is not coming from the insurance side. I welcome that piece within this legislation and I look forward to seeing how it works over a period of 18 months.

The second bit is in relation to business interruption and the impact of Covid-19. I would know this as I have been through it. I refer to the behaviour of the insurance companies towards their customers and how they treated their customers in what were extremely difficult and challenging times for businesses. Not alone during that period when consumers thought they had cover for business interruption schemes, their insurance companies put up walls before them clearly stating that they did not have cover. It took a court decision to ensure that businesses were covered for business interruption during Covid-19. Certain sectors were covered. Some businesses were not covered. During that period, the Government stepped in to support those businesses to ensure they did not fail through very troubling times. For the court to rule that a business had business interruption cover but then for insurance companies to deduct all the State supports one had got during that period was, in one sense, disgusting in terms of how the insurance businesses operated during that time. It was either the State or the insurance cover, but not both. I paid a premium to have a business interruption policy to cover the Covid-19 pandemic and I was entitled to claim that from the insurance but, because the Government stepped in in that intervening period, the insurance company will not pay that. The people of this country are at a loss in terms of that money. The insurance company is the only company that benefits out of this process.

I am delighted to see that measure in the Bill. I accept we cannot retrospectively go back on this, but if we had known this at the start of the pandemic and the Government had been in a position to say that business A was covered and business was not covered, the supports could have been targeted at the businesses which were not covered and the Government would not have been exposed, to the benefit of the insurance companies, in terms of the companies that were covered.The only ones losing out here are the people of this nation. I welcome the report and I know that we cannot go back on it retrospectively but it is something that was identified in the pandemic that we cannot allow to happen again. As a business owner, I am grateful to the Government for its supports during that period. Again, it goes to the behaviour of insurance companies, how they treat individual and business customers. Covid-19 exposed them for what they are. If there is any decency in these companies, they should pay the State back the money the Government paid to them. That is the least they should to do have any credibility with the public.