Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

My questions follow those points directly. Some 75,000 policyholders have been shafted. Many of them are small and medium enterprises and many are individuals. Somebody has failed to see this coming. If this discussion is to mean anything, we need to learn lessons. It strikes me that the dogs on the street could have worked out that there was something wrong with a company if it was licensed in Malta although its shareholders were primarily Irish, it was selling exclusively to the Irish market, its main staff operations were in Ireland and, through its name, it packaged itself as Irish. That is fishy straightaway as far as I am concerned. I cannot believe somebody in the Central Bank did not figure out much earlier that it was fishy. Why the hell would a company do that? There has to be some scam at play. It is trying to evade regulation, taxation, or both. Surely that is obvious. It is absolutely terrifying that the delegates tell me this is happening all over the place in Europe. There are companies based in Ireland that do not do any business in Ireland. Why are they here? What is the reason for their being here? There are companies selling insurance mainly in Ireland, such as Setanta, that are not licensed here.

I had an inquiry from the manager of my son's football team asking why there is such a radical difference between motor insurance premiums offered by various insurance companies. There are staggering differences, yet the underwriters of the insurance are the same people. Therefore, there is something fishy going on. The regulatory regime has failed, both at national and European levels. Is that not obviously the case? Must we not seriously ask what went wrong, why we did not spot this and whether there is an endemic problem that could mean there will almost certainly be a recurrence?