Michael McKeown

Michael McKeown

It is with great sadness that I have to tell you that Michael McKeown died yesterday morning.

Many of you will have known Michael. For those who didn't, he was one of the founders of the credit hire industry, a man who fought, and at times suffered, through the early battles that established the principles on which today's billion-pound credit-hire industry stands.

I first met him more than forty years ago, when he ran a business providing data services that linked insurers with their brokers, 20 years before the internet became a thing. A few years later he founded CRASH Services and, I suspect, became rather less popular with insurers as a result. Undaunted, he built CRASH into the largest credit hire provider in Northern Ireland, and in doing so introduced credit hire to the Province.

But Michael's influence reached well beyond his own business. From the industry's beginnings in the early 1980s he was one of its driving forces. He was a founder member of the Accident Management Association, later the CHO, and served on the executive committees of both. He helped shape the industry from its embryonic origins, and he was a stalwart in its defence through the legal and regulatory challenges of the late 1980s and early 1990s, in the Court of Appeal, the House of Lords, and before the Office of Fair Trading, long before it became the CMA.

Those who knew Michael will know he was never short of an opinion. More than that, he was never anything less than wholly committed to the collective interest of the credit hire community. During my time as Chairman of the AMA and later the CHO, he was uncompromisingly generous with his financial, commercial, emotional, and collegiate support, and he did much to make the trade body the success it was. Above all, he was an unrelenting source of ideas, some innovative, some almost unbelievably lateral (and some just too lateral to get beyond the drawing board), which on several occasions strengthened our negotiating position and ultimately shaped the way the industry evolved.

Michael retired more than a decade ago, and CRASH has since been owned by his son, Jonathan. I saw Michael a couple of times in recent years when visiting Jonathan. His enthusiasm for the industry was undimmed, but he had turned his energy to local business and community life in Newry, and to research and writing. It was an inspiration to see that, long after retirement, the flame still burned as brightly as ever.

Whether through his writing, his community work or his contribution to credit hire, Michael leaves a significant legacy. Our industry is undoubtedly stronger today because of what he gave to it over three decades. He will be deeply missed by his former colleagues and friends, by everyone who worked with him at CRASH, and most of all by his family.

I know that many of you will join me in sending our condolences and our deepest sympathy to Jonathan, to the McKeown family, and to the wider CRASH family in Northern Ireland.