Mr. Heiner Herz:

I thank the Chairman and the members for the opportunity to speak about windscreen replacement and safety in Ireland. To my left is Dr. Chris Davies from our research centre. He is the head of international research and innovation. Our quality manager, Alun Donnelly, is present also, and Mike McCarthy from TRL, the Transport Research Laboratory. We hope to be in a position to answer questions in the best possible way.

I will give some background on Autoglass. We are part of the Belgron group, which operates in 37 countries. To give an idea of size, we do about 11 million interventions on windscreens around the world, and we have 25,000 employees worldwide. Autoglass is in Ireland and in the United Kingdom. We employed 110 people in Ireland up to 2012. We do approximately 32,000 interventions of repair and replacement and 19,000 total replacements in the Republic. The presentation indicates the different locations from which we operate. I will ask Dr. Davies to speak about the technical side.