Insurance Coverage
Dail Éireann — 2026-02-10
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Pearse Doherty (SF), Donegal

Lack of access to insurance can affect communities and businesses in a very real way. The Minister of State mentioned the Central Bank report. In 2024, it reported as follows: "The occurrence of a severe flood could leave households and businesses with high levels of uninsured losses, impairing economic recovery from a flood event"., It concluded that there is "a serious risk of complacency". Everything the Minister has said is more of the same complacency. Indeed, when the Tánaiste, who is seated beside him, was Minister ten years ago he talked about flood insurance. Ten years on, nothing has happened. We have the same situation over and over again.
The Minister of State is talking about more high-level reports, meetings and so on. Right now, we have a situation where private insurance companies pick and choose who they will extend flood insurance to. We do not allow that to happen with health insurance companies. We do not say they are allowed to only pick people who are healthy, young and all of that, but we let flood insurers get away with this. What is the Government going to do? We can roll back the tapes ten years. In fairness to the Tánaiste, when he was the Minister responsible for the OPW, he said we needed to deal with this issue. However, ten years on we are still not dealing with it and there are still no solutions. When is the complacency going to end?

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-02-10/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:36+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-02-10