Mr. Conor Faughnan:

That is a big question. We had a crisis in the late 1990s, which led to the Motor Insurance Advisory Board and then the Injuries Board. In a funny way we never truly solved the problem, but the enabling sense of crisis disappeared. Incomes rose, the economy prospered, the total number of policies went up. Then we had very intense competition, which became hyper-competition, which became stupid competition, which then went broke. Through all of that, we never really solved the problem.

What was done around the same time, and the other big issue I have been lobbying on in my professional life, was road safety. Huge strides were made in that respect over this period. We had our first road safety strategy and millennium goals and all the things we are now familiar with, such as penalty points, the Garda traffic corps and blood alcohol tests, modern roads and speed limits and that sort of stuff. All of those improvements came on stream, which organically reduced the cost of claims. Road investment in motorways led to a reduction in risk per mile travelled. Many factors swung in our favour.

Back in the 1990s, the problem was actually diagnosed. A solution was put in place via the Injuries Board. The solution was undermined. It never truly worked, but a whole host of other factors swung in our favour and it ceased to be the crisis that it was. What we are now discovering, as the tide goes out, is that problems we correctly identified 20 years ago were not fixed. There is still an insane amount of legal cost in the system, there is still too much fraud-----