Insurance Ireland defending levy for flood insurance fund

Vivienne Clarke

Insurance Ireland is defending a proposal to introduce a €24 levy per insured household which would be placed into a “sustainable flood insurance fund.”

Michael Horan, Manager for Regional and Policy Development with Insurance Ireland, told Newstalk Breakfast that the four-point plan was“fundamentally about keeping Irish homes insurable, mortgageable and saleable as flood risk changes.

“The plan combines four things. It helps existing homeowners make their properties more resilient. It creates a mechanism through which otherwise difficult to insure flood risk can be pooled.

"It stops the creation of unnecessary new flood risk through planning and building standards and talks about continuing investment in large-scale flood defences.”

However, Sinn Féin TD Rose Conway Walsh later told Newstalk’s Claire Byrne show that the repeated missing of targets for infrastructure in the National Development Plan had led to the situation where the insurance industry was now “coming in to do another grab on people in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis. That is absolutely not on.”

Horan maintained that the issue had to be tackled “together” because it was now becoming a housing issue, not just an insurance issue.

At present, one in 20 properties struggle to access flood insurance, he added.

“There is a simple way, we think, of addressing that by creating a fund to help those people who cannot get flood insurance. I think it means that a certain amount of solidarity is required on the part of everybody to help those people. And by doing this, by creating a fund, we're creating a pathway out of the flood problem for those people.

“But it's not just about creating a fund, we have to reduce the risk as well.

“The fund itself would be administered by a flood agency, which would buy reinsurance, which would protect the fund. And that's really how it would work. It has to combine the four things that I'm talking about.

"It's not just about creating a fund, it's about making sure that the risk doesn't get worse. And we do that by adapting existing houses to make them more resilient and making sure that we don't have developments built in flood risk areas.”

Conway Walsh added that it was “beyond time that the government stood up to the insurance industry and said to them, show them who's in charge. And the government is in charge in this space.

“The government's job is to protect people, to protect people from flooding, to protect people from the cost of living crisis as well.”