Mr. Ciarán Breen:

There are a number of substantial reasons that has happened, one of them being that we have many delegations of additional business which occurred in the period to which the Deputy has referred. Critically, during that period we also had the alteration in the real rate of return in a case called Gill Russell v. the HSE. That had a very dramatic effect of increasing the potential liabilities and the actual liabilities of both schemes, but particularly the clinical negligence scheme. There are other issues.

If we look at clinical negligence, the costs of those claims are rising for a number of reasons. I mentioned the real rate of return. Life expectancy for many claimants has vastly improved. This is reflected in the amount of damages. For all of these reasons, it is a rising cost. We expect it to rise more significantly over the coming years as our actuaries have predicted and told us it will.