Peter Mathews (Dublin South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the witnesses. I had an enormous sense of unreality about this for the first hour of this conversation. If the witnesses saw the film "Truman", it was like that, a weightless unreality. The language of the opening remarks was so similar that I had a sense that the same author wrote both papers in that they were in committee language. I wish this conversation could have kicked off in ordinary English, as we would use with our families around the dinner table. They should get robust. The witnesses are directors appointed in the public interest. I am not going to go into the semantics of it but I am glad Deputies Doherty and Donnelly asked the questions that they did.

When the witnesses came on board at the end of 2008, the board of the group had a chairperson who had come from a totally different sector than either insurance or banking. There were other directors who were part of the establishment director club, as David McWilliams or somebody else might call it. There was complacency and stale air around the boards of banks and financial institutions. The bank did not even know how the crash had occurred. It had the highest loans to deposit ratio in the euro area, it was extraordinary, and it did not know how it got there. The excuse was that it was a mixture of an insurer and a bank and to that extent one could not apply prudential architecture tests to the balance sheet of the bank. Of course, one could. The question that arises at the top of one's fingertips is what is size of the balance sheet? What is it currently?