Ms Emma Hanrahan:

The minimum under the directive is two years. Ireland had quite a confused regime where how long it was expected the trader would be liable for any nonconformity was dependent on the value of the good and other issues. The contractual limitation period in Ireland is six years, so it was anything up to six years. At the moment, we have decided that we will continue with the limitation period of six years. A couple of stakeholders thought we should reduce the legal liability to two or three years. I believe the Law Society suggested three years. We are looking at that but in reality, we do not want to reduce consumers' rights either when it comes to high-value items. To bring it down to two or three years for a car or an expensive item might be seen as a reduction in consumer rights in Ireland. In other countries, they do separate legal liability periods out from limitation periods but in Ireland we did not specifically do that. That is why we chose this approach. Obviously, we will continue to review that.