Mr. John Moran:

There is a focus at present on this particular situation, but in some respects the same issue has been part of the system for many years, but perhaps less prevalent before, in that it is not just a question of banking. There could be staff leaving another line Department and going to work in another company where they have issues, such as going to work with a consulting firm or whatever else it might be. We have to look at those issues. We will need policy direction as to how we deal with the period of time. The normal solution for this in areas where it has occurred more commonly, which is in the private sector, has been to require persons not to engage in their new employment for what I would call a cooling off period where the information they have is no longer as sensitive. In some respects, in areas like banking it can come quite quickly to a point where one no longer has sensitive information, and we are very aware of that. The solution in that respect is typically because one can neither allow the persons to continue working nor deprive them of the right to earn a living, that one has to pay them for whatever is that period.

That in itself creates dynamics which are difficult for people to understand because we would then have a situation in which people continue to be paid while we do not want them to work in another area. Given that we could not allow Mr. Torpey to continue working in the banking sector once we knew he would be leaving us, rather than lose his services to the State during the period of time in which we were going to continue paying him, he was happy to move physically out of the Department and back to the NTMA so that he would have less exposure to information. He assisted the NTMA on other tasks during that period.