Insurance Industry
Dail Éireann — 2025-12-18
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Pearse Doherty (SF), Donegal

I appreciate that. I have engaged with the Central Bank in relation to this and it has provided me with the operating profits as commonly understood for motor insurance. It did not have them for the public liability. This is why I welcome this. This shows us two things. The insurance companies are making bumper profits. We know from the National Claims Information Database, NCID, reports that they are making three times what they told us they were targeting. However, it is worse than that because the Central Bank is using a definition of operating profit that nobody else uses. It makes that clear in the report but that is in the subtext. We need to be using standard definitions here. If we were using the standard definitions, these companies are making bigger profits. Instead of making 14% in one year, they are making 16%. This is the same in motor and in public liability. This is millions and millions of additional euro in profits. In motor insurance alone, it is a €114 million difference between using the Central Bank definition or the definition that everybody else uses. It is really important that this industry is called out for the price gouging that is going on and the bumper profits that are being made. The Central Bank does great work but it should not be using its own definition of operating profits. These figures get reported faithfully by the media and people understand it as something that it is not.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2025-12-18/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:29+00:00
Sitting date: 2025-12-18