The insurance annual reports — blue books — as published in the years in question by the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment, show that the net amount of single premium life insurance written in Ireland in the years 1988 to 2001 was as follows:
|
Euro 000’s
|
1988
|
708,544
|
1989
|
954,144
|
1990
|
707,147
|
1991
|
662,157
|
1992
|
438,893
|
1993
|
686,920
|
1994
|
750,906
|
1995
|
732,456
|
1996
|
1,182,035
|
1997
|
1,868,511
|
1998
|
3,261,874
|
1999
|
5,211,852
|
2000
|
7,556,644
|
2001
|
8,803,823
|
The insurance annual reports show that business written by companies based in Ireland into other, mainly EU, countries increased substantially during the period, rising from 2% of the total in 1988 to 53% in 2001. There may be other reasons for the year-to-year variations but these are not deducible from the information in the reports.