Mr. Liam Downey:

I apologise. I missed out on that point in my response. In the first instance, we must be authorised to conduct our current business. The European Court of Justice has ruled that state support is not appropriate. I referred to risk equalisation, but to have consistency across the market, VHI, as a State company involved in the private health insurance market, should be regulated and authorised in the same way as other companies. We need to be authorised in order to properly conduct our existing business. When we are authorised, there will be an opportunity to widen the scope of our business in certain directions. This could provide further opportunities for VHI. One of the benefits of being regulated is that it allows the company to carry out other activities which are related to the business in which we are involved. That is a matter we will be examining in order to discover the opportunities it might be appropriate for us to pursue post-regulation.

In the event that the Deputy is not aware of it, we have regulated entities within the VHI group. I refer to what we term our "diversified businesses". These are businesses other than those relating to health insurance and the entities involved were regulated some years ago. What we are talking about regulating in this instance is the private health insurance business of VHI. As stated, we are also involved in a range of other businesses - the SwiftCare clinics, HomeCare and so on - which are already regulated. When we talk about readiness, we are referring to opportunities regulation will offer us in expanding our business in an appropriate way in the future.