“Alarmed” Alliance meets PIAB Minister

The Alliance for Insurance Reform met Minister of State Robert Troy (whose delegated responsibilities include that of the Personal Injuries Assessment Board) recently at which AIR expressed its alarm at the publication of Central Bank data showing that the percentage of motor insurance personal injury claims settled by the PIAB had fallen to just 14%. 

 

Prior to the meeting the Managing Director of McCambridge’s of Galway Eoin McCambridge, a director of the Alliance, commented, “When PIAB was launched in 2004 it had a profound and immediate impact on insurance costs as was intended. But it has been undermined since then to the extent that far more cases now go to litigation with no benefit for plaintiffs but enormous fees for solicitors and barristers”.

Director of the Alliance Peter Boland said, “If urgent and radical reform of PIAB is not carried out, it will be irrelevant within a decade and we’ll be back to a situation where the compensation of people injured due to the negligence of others will be a process managed and controlled by the legal profession, for the benefit of the legal profession, with dire consequences for the cost and availability of insurance cover in Ireland. It’s up to the Minister to address this issue now and we call on him to publish detailed reform proposals and most importantly to follow through on those proposals as a matter of extreme urgency.”

AIR recently welcomed a High Court “landmark” ruling which supported the fast good group Supermacs in refusing to hand over CCTV footage of an alleged incident to the plaintiff as part of a Personal Injuries case being taken against the company.

In doing so, the High Court upheld an earlier decision of the Circuit Court.