Mr. Conor Faughnan:

There are two different things. One concerns paying for the Setanta mess and any future messes. At present, it is envisaged that this essentially will get paid for by all other insurers. That is a mess and entities will not enter a market that has such a rule in it. If one wishes to trade in Ireland, one must bear in mind that as soon as one pitches camp in Ireland one now will be obliged to pay the bill if one's competitor does something stupid and goes bust. That is not sustainable and must be fixed.

The other question is about regulation, and again, there is material in our document and in stuff we published last November. The Irish Central Bank is inadequately resourced to be able to properly regulate the insurance industry. While the Central Bank gets its guidance on that from the Government, if one wants to employ actuaries and people with significant technical expertise, one must be in a position to pay realistic salaries for that expertise.

If one does not have a budget to do any of that, one will not be physically able to do the amount of work that is needed to watch that property. I said earlier that, collectively, the insurance industry settles about 70% of cases privately. Some form of aggregated data on that is provided to the Central Bank but the Central Bank does not have the tools to be able to do the work that is necessary on that data provided. Additional resources need to be provided to the Central Bank to enable it to employ the expertise it needs to do the work that needs to be done. I have no principal objection to an insurance company that is regulated overseas trading in Ireland. That is all good. We are all members of a Single Market, but if the regulator overseas makes a complete hash of the job and falls asleep at the wheel, I do not know why Ireland Inc. would not sending a letter to Malta which states, "Dear Sirs, please find enclosed an invoice for €100 million reflecting the fact that you did not regulate this insurance entity properly". I still do not know why that has not been done.