Hard-pressed motorists found a saviour this week: Dorothea Dowling, a steel hand in a velvet glove, reports Eithne Donnellen
Dorothea Dowling is a straight talking, no-nonsense businesswoman with at least 15 years' experience working in the insurance industry here and in Britain.
Her full-time job is as group liability manager of CIÉ where she has delivered significant savings for the company since her recruitment in 1990.
Over the past four years she has combined her full-time job with chairing the Motor Insurance Advisory Board (MIAB), a voluntary role for which she is paid expenses only.
But it is her emergence this week as White Knight to the Irish motorist (bled white by the insurance industry) which has cast her as a latter day heroine.
She is the driving force behind the MIAB's report which this week showed that, despite whingeing for years, the Irish insurance industry was 11 times more profitable than its UK counterpart.
She proclaimed on radio that research had shown the plain people of Ireland were right all along. By common consent, she made mince meat of the vested interests who challenged her assertions. So skilled did she seem, her victims probably didn't even know they'd been mugged.
She featured on several radio programmes, in newspapers, and on RTÉ's Prime Time where she took on Ken Murphy, director general of the Law Society, and Michael Hogan of the Insurance Industry Federation. Commenting on her Prime Time performance yesterday, Pat Kenny told his radio audience she had "wiped the floor with the two gentlemen and wiped the floor with wonderful style".
Thousands of man hours went into the drafting of her report and while the comprehensive 750-page document was compiled by a 17-member board appointed by the Government, it was Dowling's determination which is credited with forcing the insurance industry to release previously undisclosed data, including its profit margins.
Her thorough knowledge of her brief meant she came out of each confrontation unruffled, calmly stressing she was only presenting the facts.
She pulled no punches when she attacked the legal profession and suggested if solicitors' unauthorised practices could not be policed by the Law Society, it was time they were policed by somebody else.
Dowling became the public face of the widely applauded MIAB report. However, she is a private person and did not wish to discuss her life when contacted by The Irish Times. Even those who work with her in CIÉ appear to know little about her personal life. However, one senior executive described her as "extremely hard-working" and highly regarded by her colleagues.
"She's as tough as old button boots," the source said. "The company carries 300 million passengers a year, has 12,500 employees and gets a fairly significant number of insurance claims, yet she will fight every one of them very vigorously."
Sheila McCabe, former president of the Irish Road Haulage Association, has worked with her on the MIAB for the past four years. She likens her to "a steel hand in a velvet glove", describing her as straightforward, someone who cuts to the chase, but who is willing to take on board the opinions of others.
"You know the way sometimes people take over on a committee. Well, she didn't take over. She was determined but gracious and her quick wit meant she could calm heated debates in seconds, "but not at anybody else's expense".
When the MIAB was set up in 1998, Dowling was an obvious choice to chair it because of her experience in insurance, risk management and arbitration.
She is also likely to get the chance to see the report through as she is expected to be appointed to an implementation group. The lawyers and insurers haven't heard the last of her .