Mr. Michael McAteer:

Perhaps we will take the sale question, which was one of the questions raised by the Deputy. No insurance company remaining in administration is a long-term viable enterprise because people seek certainty when picking an insurance company. Consequently, it was critical that we had a sale and that a sale occurred because, otherwise, I note the company's sales were declining during the period of administration because a company being in administration does not provide customer confidence. In addition, administrators cannot make strategic decisions on items such as capital expenditure and so on because the company was loss-making at the same time. Consequently, it was necessary to sell the company and to do so as quickly as possible. We were also faced with a clear possibility that there would be no sale. This was not a case in which a queue of people was lining up to purchase the company. We did the best deal possible to secure the 1,500 jobs and had we not achieved the sale, they would have been lost. The Deputy also raised the question of benefit to the State and what is important in the future is that, both directly and indirectly, the State has a 50% interest in Liberty Insurance. That company is now run by professionals, in the sense that they are from the fifth largest insurance company in the world. They run the business and have the expertise and the access to capital. They have all the know-how to run an insurance company properly and the State has an indirect 50% stake in that business in the future. If that business is successful, the Irish State will benefit.