Connect: Billboards show a picture of a bloke wearing a neck brace made of euro notes. There's text about a "hard neck" and how insurance fraud is "a crime". The message is clear: fraudsters are driving up the cost of insurance for law-abiding people. It's true, but there's something about those billboards that rankles.
The obvious aspect of what rankles is that many people consider the insurance industry to be a moral crime itself. It's not illegal, of course, but such are its profits - motor insurance alone profited by €209 million in 2003 - that it seems, well . . . dodgy! No matter how you dress it up, insurance, like the banks and other financial services, make profits through usury.
Well, fair enough. There's no point in being high-minded or sniffy about that. After all, the prospect of substituting certainty for uncertainty in aspects of life appeals to practically everybody: we all want some insurance. Whether or not it should be provided by for-profit outfits which are increasingly avaricious is another matter. Many people believe the "fraud" operates both ways.
Consequently, there's limited sympathy for insurance firms. No matter how often insurers insist that fraud costs policyholders, public condemnation of fraudsters will always be provisional. It's not that most people don't acknowledge that it costs them money, or would encourage fraud, or believe it to be a victimless crime. It's just that they believe they are being ripped off every way.
The Irish Insurance Federation (IIF) said this week that more than 2,000 cases of suspected fraud have been reported to a hotline set up two years ago. The line is called "Insurance Confidential" - a name to give you the creeps if you think about it. Callers, known as "concerned members of the public", may be acting righteously. Then again, they may not.
At the heart of it all is honesty. Clearly, it's dishonest to try to defraud any outfit by supplying it with bogus information. Yet the market version of honesty - whatever you can commercially and legally charge punters - is obviously deficient too. Hence insurance companies pay actuaries very well to determine what they can get away with. It's really a form of bookmaking.
Anyway, the billboards' insistence that insurance fraud "is a crime" - which it is - seems strangely self-subverting. It reminds you that the more laws a state invents the more each one - especially those that deal with money, goods and property - is marginally diminished. At some point, an appeal to people's better natures rather than legislation against their worst ones is surely preferable.
Michael McDowell, however, appears to believe that laws upon laws upon laws are the answer. He either has introduced or is promising to introduce Bills on immigration, criminal justice, private security, data protection, drink, defamation, human rights, the Garda, property, childcare, the prison service and other aspects of Irish life.
Certainly, laws are one answer but the deluge of Bills since he became Minister for Justice leaves him open to the charge of being too authoritarian and rather dictatorial. Other, arguably unfair, political epithets have been hurled at him predictably too. Still, it is telling that the insurance fraud billboards seem seamless with his vision of Ireland.
Metaphorically, at least, the billboards wave a hectoring finger at the public: flush out your fraudsters, they say. Even worse - considering New Ireland's characteristic view of Old Ireland - they appear to say their message is exclusively for the public's benefit. As such, then, they also rankle because they're disingenuous and because we sense it's the same old story.
A 1950s version might have trumpeted a religious message - something perhaps about saving your soul. Now you're lectured about saving your money. Half a century ago, "flush out your fraudsters" might have translated to "flush out your sinners". The lack of reflexivity is alarming. There is, quite simply, no acknowledgment of the possibility of culpability on behalf of the message-bearer.
We now know some of what religious power in Ireland in the 1950s was doing. (It wasn't all bad - and neither is today's insurance industry - but some of it was abominable.) In time, the public will likely condemn what financial services are doing today and those hectoring billboards may become as hypocritical to a future generation as, say, old religious processions are to many today.
Under McDowell law, people convicted of insurance fraud could get 10 years in jail. Serves them right, people may say. Perhaps it does. The climate of opinion will change however and those who feel driven to use the "Insurance Confidential" line could become as shameful to themselves as the creeping-Jesus types who decades ago divulged information to their clerical masters.
"The high response rate [ via the phone line] clearly indicates that the public are fed up with insurance fraudsters," Mike Kemp, the federation's chief executive, said on Monday. Okay, but is it a welcome development that the Republic risks becoming again a society of informers, albeit to new masters? There really is something sinister about that phone line and those billboards.