Mr. Paul Carty:

There are three questions within that. At the outset, I want to point out I am a managing general agent and I represented Zenith in Ireland, so I have to be careful. I wanted to put that on the record so we know where we are. I want to deal with the disc piece first. I liken discs to the old airline tickets in that it is time they were gotten rid of. It is a paper chase, given we need special printing, we have to stick in them in envelopes and get things to hold them up on windscreens, and so on. We have gone way beyond that. Gardaí should be able to go to a car and know it is insured, taxed and registered - that is where we should be. I do not think we should be deflected from that target, so let us go for that. That is the way it should be.

On the question of the hypothetical €300 increase, the Deputy is looking for some sort of apportionment of how much one could blame on the various factors. The Deputy knows we cannot give him more than a view. I believe a significant portion is that it was underpriced in the first place because the market had just gone down. Whereas we hear lots of quotes about a hypothetical Mrs. Brown whose premium has gone from €300 to €460 in a year, maybe it should not have been €300 in the first place. Whether it should have been €340 or €360, I do not know, and perhaps six years earlier, it could have been lower again. We are taking it at a particular point, so there is a correction.

There is the question of the environment we are in, to which Ms Dowling and my colleague, Mr. Phelan, referred. We do not know the effect of Solvency II, which historically was very important here. We have to remember that under Solvency II, all insurers next May have to publish what is called an SFCR - a solvency and financial control report - on their figures for 2016. We do not know what balance sheet re-jigging is going on this year to make sure it looks the right way, but that can have a bearing on what insurers might do. They will hardly publish that they are doing that for the purposes of their SFCR.

As to Zenith and Mr. Humphreys, whom I know well and who is a very nice man, they have signalled they are withdrawing from the market. They have said that, for a variety of reasons, they are simply unhappy with the courts system and the uncertainty, they are unhappy that the Injuries Board is not dealing with the number of cases they would like it to deal with and they are unhappy - their words - with the co-operation they have been getting from the industry. All I can say is that my company is an associate member, not a full member, of Insurance Ireland and we have access to the data enrichment and risk intelligence to help us underwrite the risks.

Those are the facts.