Sir, - As a young person about to buy a new car, I must express my disgust at the continuing discrimination suffered by young people from the motor insurance companies of Ireland. I am 22, and I have passed the driving test. I have not been involved in any accident in my one-year driving history. However, to obtain third party fire and theft insurance on a 1-litre car, the cheapest quote I could find was £2,388.41. I have obtained an insurance quote from the same company for a person 50 years old, with the same driving history and same car, which was £878.19. Clearly, I am being discriminated against purely because of my age.
Insurance companies claim the statistics prove that younger drivers are more likely to be involved in accidents. I do not dispute these statistics, but I must question the legality of discriminating against a person for a reason over which the person has no control, just because there are statistics available to prove an apparently greater risk. If a study was performed which found that black people were more likely to cause accidents than white people, would it be fair to presume that insurance application forms would then include a section where the applicant would tick the box appropriate to his or her race? I would think that a public uproar would result from such a policy, yet this society and its Government seem to condone similar policies when it comes to young people.
All the major human rights laws in the world declare it illegal to discriminate against a person for what they are, rather than what they have done.
There are many irresponsible drivers on our roads, and I regret to say that many of these are young. However, because of my age and sex (two factors that I don't have control over), insurance companies assume that when I sit behind the wheel of my car, I'm going to crash it. How convenient that this assumption lines their pockets with money! I would wholeheartedly support a policy to give higher premiums to those drivers who cause accidents, because they are the ones responsible for the carnage on our roads. I would even go so far as to remove their right to drive on our roads. But I have never done anything to warrant such a high insurance premium.
The recent equality legislation introduced in Ireland has obviously not been introduced to our Government, who allow this blindly discriminatory practice to continue. In fact, the Government recently approved a request by the insurance companies to raise premiums for young drivers by approximately one quarter. - Yours, etc.,
John Barker, Ardmore Drive, Artane, Dublin 5.