Mr. Gerry Hassett:

One is the primary reason and then there are other secondary reasons. If we take, say, motor insurance, 8% of claims relate to personal injury and 75% of costs relate to personal injury. A typical personal injury claim for, say, a whiplash soft tissue injury is of the order of €20,800. That is four and a half times the size of an equivalent award in the UK. That is the primary issue.

In terms of the secondary issue, we are short of data on this but our supposition is that because the awards are relatively high, it creates a bit of an incentive for people to commit fraud here more than, say, in the UK. Also, we are aware that the cases that get litigated and go through the courts system can attract legal costs of up to 60% of the settlement amount. The fundamental issue is the awards. Everything else flows from that.