Eoghan Murphy (Dublin Bay South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Absolutely, I do not disagree with that at all. All I am saying is that if the concern of the Central Bank was that legislation was not in place to allow it to perform its regulatory function, that has not been brought to my attention. If there are concerns that capital requirements are not adequate, that has not been brought to my attention. Solvency II is a new regime and there is more intense scrutiny by the Central Bank of these companies. Again, it is up to the Central Bank to speak to that issue.

I do not want to reach any conclusions here. Deputy Doherty has come to a conclusion and has articulated very strongly his assessment of why premiums have gone up. He has spoken about the market model and how the competitors acted in that model, as well as the instrument of provisioning that was put in place in terms of capital requirements and what that has meant in the last two years. If that is the conclusion the committee comes to, then we will have to deal with that. We must work on this together but I cannot come to that conclusion yet.