Linda Nelson Murray (Fine Gael)

I want to go back on Deputy Brennan's point. He talked about this committee getting involved, and the response from the alliance is that it should be multidisciplinary committees getting involved in terms of the judicial guidelines and the personal injury guidelines. When the Minister for justice received that from the Judicial Council, it was considering going up by 17%. We would never ask the Judicial Council to come up with settlements for murder or theft. If there is separation of powers, I do not understand why there was not separation of powers there. It is very important that that is done in the future.

I want to quote an excerpt from the draft guidelines that were presented:

In carrying out its review, the Committee has had regard to two matters in particular. The first is the fact that in the three years since the adoption of the 1st Edition, significant global and national inflation has occurred. The second is the jurisprudence of the Superior Courts that has emerged in the same period regarding the proper approach to the assessment of damages in multiple injuries cases.

The Committee has not found it possible to carry out any meaningful analysis of the quantum of court awards given under the Guidelines to date that might inform this review.

It therefore had not got the proper information but was saying we just need to go up by 17% anyway. It will be very scary if that happens again in two years' time, so it is very important that this committee works on that and that we come up with a way in which the Injuries Resolution Board is brought in on that. That is key. We will see this in two years' time because it is taking a few years to get through the Injuries Resolution Board and to get to the courts system so you do not have to pull it back.

The report also stated, "The Board decided to modify the guidelines in order to reflect the HICP rate applicable at the time of its own consideration of the draft amendments to the guidelines." I am not an expert on inflation, but it just seemed to be all wrong. The whole thing was all wrong. I am glad we did stop it but I would be worried in a couple of years if we do not sort it out.

What I will take from today is that there are a few key and very important messages that we need, from our point of view as political people, to put out, whether on radio, on television - I am putting my marketing hat on here - about culture change. We have spoken about competition. The biggest thing that has been mentioned today is the lack of competition in the market. We need to let people know that there has been a culture change and that the Injuries Resolution Board is the place to go when you have a claim, while, as was said, not taking away from solicitors when it is something very serious that can go down that road then. Also, the message from our competition Department needs to go out to Europe that Ireland is open for business, including from public liability, that we have sorted out all these reforms and that we now need the business here in our country in order that the profits that the businesses that are here already have can be shared. That is what we need to do as a Government. We need to encourage our Minister and our competition Department to go out and say we are definitely open for business and to make sure there is nothing stopping that business coming into Ireland, going back to a couple of other points raised earlier.

I thank the witnesses for coming in.