Mr. Pat Houlihan:

The Commission's decision to move forward with a directive and a regulation is symptomatic of other actions it has taken in international market areas and so on. It has picked this blueprint and will stick with it.

The crucial issue is that mentioned by Ms Hall, namely, the discretion for member states to decide matters themselves. The previous Eighth Directive included a core definition for public interest entities, to which members states could add if they so wished. What is happening now is that there is an enormous expansion in the core list and member states can do nothing about it. As stated by Ms Hall, it would be reasonable to provide for a smaller core list to which members states can add, depending on the importance of the entity in their jurisdiction. Unfortunately, the Commission, on a point of principle, believes that the previous eighth directive was not uniformly implemented throughout the Community and wants to eliminate, as much as possible, discrepancies in how this is done. Unfortunately, Ireland as of now may be the victim of that particular philosophical approach by the Commission. It is a serious issue for us in terms of the consequences for IAASA - that is, a plethora of work that is not really necessary but which somebody has to pay for, and a jeopardising of those public interest entities that do not need to be described or treated as such in terms of their competitiveness in the marketplace. As I said earlier, only a handful of member states have a concentration of these firms. Unfortunately, unless something else happens, Ireland may suffer. As I mentioned earlier, we are making a submission to the Commission on the justification for their inclusion. We are doing our best to address this issue.