I found a [broken link removed] which may give some hope in this atrocious situation. It's on page 16, entitled "€3,000 insurance fund increase for reviews not carried out - possible 96,000 other cases".
Here's a summary/cut & paste of sections:
Complainant purchased unit-linked, whole of life insurance policy in 1983, life cover approx. €240,000, yearly premium €900. Policy included ‘policy review’ provision which provided for the review of the premium and benefit payable under the policy at stated intervals.
Review carried out on 10th anniversary of the policy, Company advised there was no need to change premium payable in order to maintain benefits under the policy. However, in 2008 the Company wrote to Complainant advising that the premium payable was no longer sufficient to maintain the level of cover under the policy. The Company advised the Complainant that she could continue to pay annual premium of €900 for life cover of €85,000 or maintain life cover of €240,000 for an increased annual premium of €4,900.
Ombudsman looked at the policy documentation and ... concluded that the Company was entitled to carry out policy reviews. However, the Ombudsman noted that while the Company carried out a review on the 10th anniversary, it failed to carry out reviews in 1998 and 2003. The Ombudsman found that reviews should have been carried out at these times and by not doing so, the Complainant did not have the opportunity to consider her life cover options at an earlier date than 2008.
The Ombudsman directed the Company to increase the value of the Complainant’s fund by €3,000 and to carry out a review based on this increased value.
The Ombudsman had serious concerns that this failure may have occurred in other instances and he informed the Company and the Financial Regulator in March 2009 that he would expect similar policies be reviewed to ensure that this was not the case.
Due to a High Court judgment he could not direct the Company to do so and he was accordingly pleased to note the May 2009 Company’s response. It indicated that to identify if each policy had all relevant reviews carried out would involve manually checking 96,000 policies which would be an inordinate amount of work. Instead it proposed to carry out a sample review in the region of 160 policies and the results of same would be furnished to the Ombudsman.
While the Ombudsman was satisfied with this approach he requested that the random sample be increased to 300 and he awaits its outcome.
Hopefully this will help in some way. I don't actually know what you should do next, perhaps others can advise, but I think it would be no harm to phone the Financial Ombudsmans office (Lo Call: 1890 88 20 90) in light of the above case. Good luck.