Calls for urgent and radical reform to strengthen the Board’s role
The Alliance for Insurance Reform this week met Minister of State Robert Troy, the Minister whose delegated responsibilities include the Personal Injuries Assessment Board (PIAB); and expressed its alarm at the publication of data by the Central Bank which shows the percentage of motor insurance personal injury claims settled by PIAB has fallen to only 14%.
Commenting prior to the meeting, Eoin McCambridge, managing director of McCambridge’s of Galway and director of the Alliance said “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.”
Peter Boland, director of the Alliance said “If urgent and radical reform of PIAB is not carried out, it will be irrelevant within a decade and we will 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 is 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.”