My Department has raised with the Motor Insurers' Bureau of Ireland (MIBI), Insurance Ireland and insurance companies on many occasions over the last two years the issue of a robust motor insurance database. The establishment of this database will enable an Garda Síochána to better check and enforce motor insurance compliance which will assist in reducing the cost of uninsured driving. The issue has been discussed by my Department with An Garda Síochána at regular meetings since 2015, following which a provision was included in Section 19 of the Road Traffic Act 2016 of December 2016 specifying in greater detail the information to be provided by the insurance industry to An Garda Síochána, to my Department and to the MIBI, with the database being the appropriate mechanism to deliver the required information.
Officials from my Department and from an Garda Síochána met with the MIBI and Insurance Ireland last week to progress the establishment of the database. It was agreed that a sub-group will be set up to deal with the technical aspects of the database build, following the development and agreement of an appropriate governance structure for the database and the accuracy of the information it contains. The establishment of the database is a complex piece of work, requiring the insurance industry to gather certain information from its customers which many currently do not, and requiring IT changes to datafields and to policy documents. Until the design and project plan have been agreed, proposed dates for the database to become fully operational are obviously going to be tentative, but the insurance industry is optimistic that an initial phase of the database will be available for testing by end September 2017.
