Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 20 December 2012

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform

Role and Contribution of Public Interest Directors in Financial Institutions: Discussion

1:15 pm

Dr. Michael Somers:

I do not. I do not know what the context for those comments was. I read about them in the newspapers where they got great headlines. Anything to do with bashing banks gets very good headlines. It is only recently that the bank has put together this team of 2,000 people, all of whom had to be retrained. The problem is that the banks were used to lending money and much less accustomed to getting it back and dealing with those who got into distress. We all know we got into this mess because money was being made too freely available. Bank staff have had to be retrained and reprogrammed to clean up the mess. It has only been done in relatively recent times since Mr. Duffy came on board as CEO. We are ready to go and Mr. Duffy has put these people to work.

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