Mr. John Cahalan:

I thank the Senator for his remarks. We are very proud of being Irish and we have been in business for 50 years. As we do not have a wealthy parent like our competitors, it is very important for us to get our pricing right. We cannot go to London, Germany or France to ask for a bailout. Unfortunately, over the past ten or 15 years new entrants have come into the insurance market and driven prices down. The Senator knows of the companies whose parent organisations had to put large amounts of money back into their reserves. Most recently, we had the experience of Setanta and Kudos.

As an Irish indigenous insurer, it is important for us to charge a fair price for our product. We do not have the comfort of a wealthy parent. Are we being bullied? We feel that we are very agile. We need to be more disruptive because we do not have our competitors' budgets. As we are led by a very capable CEO, we feel that we are very much up for the fight. We have a unique distribution model with a branch network that our competitors do not have. We feel our closeness to our customer base gives us a unique advantage which we need to leverage as best we can. As Mr. McMahon mentioned, the sector is highly competitive. Maintaining our pricing discipline is critical because we do not have a wealthy parent to come in and bail us out.