Mr. Michael Finn:

More letters are still being received, but approximately 119 solicitors have contacted me about their concerns about the consequences for their clients. I do not want to comment on individual cases, but some of the media coverage is not 100% accurate. No one went to prison as a direct result of a single FCN-type offence. Anybody who was in court and subsequently ended up in prison was sent there for a multitude of issues, of which an FCN might have been one. If a person had no insurance or committed another offence with an FCN-type offence, it could have been listed as part of a batch of court outcomes where he or she was sent to jail, but nobody was sent to jail solely for committing an FCN-type offence. Any situation where a person convicted of an FCN-type offence ended up in jail was as a consequence of also being charged with a series of non-FCN-related offences.