Mr. Tom O'Mahony:

I can. The legislation from the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government is colloquially referred to as "gapping". It basically aims to remove the possibility people had in the past of declaring a vehicle as having been off the road after the event. This was regarded as being the primary method people used to evade motor tax. That legislation came into place last summer. When we had the discussion last year, there was general agreement, particularly based on the surveys we had done using the cameras on the M50, that the evasion rate was in the region of 5%, or 5%-plus. At the end of May, 149,000 more vehicles were taxed than had been the case during the same period last year. Gerry O'Malley, who heads the national vehicle and driver file, was with us for the discussion last year and is absolutely recognised as the greatest expert in the country on motor taxation, estimates, based on his knowledge of new car sales and what one would expect to happen, that the taxing of 130,000 of those vehicles is attributable to the gapping measures. We regard the actual live fleet of cars in the country as being about 2.6 million. Doing the maths on that, we would estimate that there has been a 5% increase in the number of cars taxed specifically on foot of the closing of that loophole in that legislation. That 5% is of the same general order as what we were estimating last year. I am not claiming for a minute that nobody evades motor tax, but I think it can safely be said that this is a very significant return on the work involved in developing that legislation. We would put the motor tax value of that at somewhere north of €50 million.