Sean Barrett (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the visitors. I agree with what Senator Thomas Byrne and Deputy Pearse Doherty have said, that these visitors have played a huge role in formulating public policy on these issues.

We had the insurers in this morning. As raised by some speakers, not only do we have a bank regulation problem in Ireland, we have an insurance regulation problem as well. We went through the list of ICI, PMPA, Quinn and now there is Setanta. Genworth has been recorded, in the last quarter, as having losses of $844 million. Who will bail it out if we have it here? Another one of the presenters was associated with FBD, which had a profit warning a while ago, but he only brought out the profitable bit of FBD. Do we have standards for insurance companies? Like the banks, they seem to think the taxpayer is a handy number.