Fintan Warfield (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this Bill on behalf of my colleague Senator Gavan. The problems in the insurance industry are well known to all of us. My party and others - I am thinking particularly of my party colleague Deputy Doherty - have worked hard over the years to highlight the exceptionally high premiums and the rip-off nature of insurance in this country. His Bill from 2021 is unfortunately being blocked by the Government. We welcome that this Insurance (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill has been brought forward, primarily to address the issues of business interruption insurance in the context of Covid-19 and dual pricing. Many businesses that were forced to close because of public health restrictions, primarily in the hospitality sector, were covered by their insurance companies, but it then transpired that insurance companies were deducting the value of State supports provided to firms during the pandemic from the value of those payouts. Given that wage subsidy schemes, tax waivers and other State supports were essentially paid for by the taxpayer, in effect taxpayers' money has subsidised the insurance industry. Insurance companies devised a system whereby they indirectly made a profit from State supports to struggling businesses. The Minister of State said that the Government would respond and that insurance companies would not be let off the hook. They did well out of the pandemic. Despite what the Minister of State claims, they have been let off the hook. The problem with the legislation before us is that all it does is require the gathering of information. There is nothing here that would prevent it from happening again. There is nothing here that would require the insurance companies to pay the State back.

Sections 3 and 4 require the Central Bank to publish as part of the national claims information database data on any deductions from insurance claim settlements by insurance companies that relate to public moneys. Section 8 amends the Consumer Insurance Contracts Act 2019, which will require insurers to notify their customers of any such deductions, but there is no indication of what will happen with that information. Sections 5 and 6, in Part 3 of the Bill, address the issue of dual pricing in the insurance industry, also known as price gouging. Again, the legislation does not do anything to end dual pricing or price walking. It just asks for a report on something that the Central Bank has introduced independent of the Government and would probably have provided its own reports on in any case. Therefore, this is a disappointing Bill in many respects. We are not opposing the provisions of the Bill. It does include several technical and necessary provisions in regard to the Consumer Insurance Contracts Act and the temporary run-off regime, but it is a disappointment that the Minister of State and the Government claim to be introducing legislation to deal with dual pricing and the behaviour of insurance companies which shamefully deducted State supports from business interruption insurance payments but have produced a Bill which does not do much to address either of those issues.

Price gouging through dual pricing will be banned by the Central Bank, independently of the Government, on 1 July. Outside of that, there are still major issues to be resolved in the insurance industry. I mentioned that the Government continues to block Deputy Doherty's Bill to deal with these challenges. It would be of more benefit to consumers if the Government got behind that Bill as it aims to push down insurance premiums for consumers across the board. That is what is really needed.