Lawyers ‘largest obstacle’ to insurance cuts
Dorothea Dowling, head of the Personal Injuries Assessment Board (PIAB), said the largest obstacle to the success of the board was the campaign against it by lawyers.
“What we’re really battling against is the really surprising, deliberate campaign of misinformation by the professions from whom we would have expected more,” she said.
From early next year the PIAB will offer claimants an alternative means to the courts to settle insurance claims. It is estimated that insurance premiums will drop by 30% as legal fees, which account for 40% of settlement costs, are lessened.
However, speaking in today’s Irish Examiner, Ms Dowling said she was disappointed that the legal profession continued to oppose the PIAB.
In particular she focused on the Law Society council elections in which one candidate, solicitor Stuart Gilhooly, is running on an anti-PIAB platform.
“It’s all about fees at the end of the day. It’s quite simple and it’s interesting that in the Law Society elections they’re putting up an anti-PIAB candidate,” she said.
“I would have thought there were lots of issues of civil liberties, criminal law ... etc where it would be far more important to put up a candidate in the election. But it seems that when it comes to their own pockets they will put up candidates in the election on this basis.”
Mr Gilhooly last night rejected the accusation.
“I am very surprised at Ms Dowling’s comments,” she said.
“What we have always rejected and continue to dispute is that the level of such claims is anywhere near the percentages which have been consistently peddled by the insurance industry and similarly vested interests.
"My concern now is that this small minority will simply find it much easier to succeed in obtaining compensation because the PIAB has no method of distilling real, genuine claims from those that are not,” he said.
