Meaningful Engagement Is Needed From the Oireachtas on Insurance Reform

DUBLIN, Ireland, April 18 -- The Irish Small and Medium Enterprises Association issued the following news release:

ISME calls on the members of the Joint Committee on Business, Enterprise and Innovation to meaningfully engage with the Alliance for Insurance Reform at their hearing this afternoon.

Reform of our personal injuries system is glacially slow, and suggests that legislators are afraid of vested interests. It is time to put the interests of citizens and small businesses before those of lawyers and insurance companies.

ISME calls on the Oireachtas to:

* Apply international benchmarks to general damages awards, which are vastly higher in Ireland than in any other peer European jurisdiction.

* Put the Book of Quantum on a legislative basis, to minimise judicial discretion in setting general damages, in accordance with precedent already set by the Supreme Court, and the Civil Liability Act 1961.

* Require the Central Bank to publish its Summary of Annual Insurance Statistics, (the 'Blue Book') which it has suppressed since 2015. This is essential in holding insurers to account.

* Introduce, without delay, a statutory offence of perjury in Ireland. If ISME has not convinced members of the Oireachtas that we need to codify the offence to tackle insurance fraud, then the perjurous antics of the great and the good before our tribunals of inquiry and the High Court should do so.

* Amend our laws and rules of court to require the automatic criminal investigation of false or misleading claims, and to require that false or misleading claimants must automatically bear the costs of their dishonest actions incurred by defendants.

* Reform the laws of defamation in Ireland. We did not require the arrival of Justin Timberlake on our shores to realise our defamation laws are a farce, and have been reduced to a plaything for the rich, the famous and the larcenous.