Action Plan for Insurance Reform: Statements Seanad Éireann — 2026-05-13 ============================================================ Gareth Scahill (FG), Nominated by the Taoiseach The Minister of State is welcome once again to the Chamber. I will follow up on what Senator Higgins has said about the community model. Many of the points I wanted to make have been touched on, for example with regard to the voluntary nature within our communities. Coming up to Christmas each year, businesses and volunteers in towns give up their time to hang up Christmas lights. They have to pay out an amount of money to insure the public liability for those lights. In order to cut costs, everyone volunteers at a time when they cannot afford to give up that time, yet they are still paying out money to insurance providers. I am involved with similar schemes. The National Trails Office covers public liability on our national walks throughout the country. If we want to promote these walks, however, we have to take out separate insurance to bring people on them so they will be encouraged to use them at a later stage. Senator Higgins might have struck on something when she spoke about going back to the mutuals that were looked at in the past. That is something to look at. The Minister of State mentioned transparency, accessibility and affordability. Every speaker here today has brought an element of that into everything they have said. I will touch on flood cover. The OPW and local authorities have invested in flood relief schemes and risk reduction measures. Communities should be seeing reductions reflected in their premiums, first and foremost, but they should also be seeing improvements in the availability of the cover itself. I recently spoke to a man who is trying to sell a couple of houses in an estate. An area nearby has been deemed a flood risk. He is having trouble accessing insurance in order to sell those houses. Action No. 18 in the action plan refers to "work with key stakeholders to facilitate Government investment in flood relief schemes being reflected in the affordability and availability of flood insurance". This is to be done by "strengthening governance" and through "reduced premiums for resilient properties and innovative insurance products for climate-vulnerable areas". I ask the Minister of State to comment on that in his response. I raise the whole idea of wider regional access to insurance. The Alliance for Insurance Reform gave me an example of one business as a practical example of a lack of competition that makes it difficult for the business to be able to avail of insurance. The alliance referred to a midlands water sports activity centre in Roscommon which reported that its premiums were equivalent to 10% of its turnover, and 40% higher than UK and EU competitors, despite having no claims. Access to that insurance is important. In my own area - I live in a rural part of west Roscommon - the company keeps telling me that my insurance premium is going up annually because the area is susceptible. I would love to see the transparency side of that, because there is no history of theft or claims. I have often spoken in this House about the need for additional gardaí, which is a really topical issue. I wonder whether insurance companies are increasing our premiums in certain areas because of the known lack of gardaí. If so, there should be a lot more transparency on that too. I will finish by speaking about the whole issue of fraud. I have been dealing recently with an awful lot of online fraud. The Garda Insurance Fraud Co-ordination Office, which was set up in 2021, has dealt with 98 cases. We all know that over the same five-year period, there were approximately 18,000 personal injury claims. The office is dealing with 0.5% of the claims put forward, even though we are told regularly by the insurance sector that up to 20% of claims are fraudulent. We need to support the Garda an awful lot more with that and try to resource them for that. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-05-13/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:56+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-05-13