Mr. Aidan Carrigan:

When we came before this committee to discuss the single supervisory mechanism before Christmas, we outlined that the issue of banking union was critical and that we believed an integrated financial framework with mutual funding and centralised control was something that would protect the Irish taxpayer in the future. We said that even though there was a range of other legislation flowing around Europe - at the time there were 21 different dossiers - we would focus on the banking union dossiers during our Presidency. We are happy to say we have managed to bring the single supervisory mechanism and the capital requirements directive over the line. In fact, the capital requirements directive was there for some 18 months and we brought it to a conclusion. We brought the single supervisory mechanism to a conclusion in record time. With our limited and scarce resources, our priority is to apply our resources to the extent we can to the resolution area to try to complete the banking union framework and build in those protections. Separately from that, there is a range of dossiers in the markets area on which we are making progress, and we are bringing forward legislation on the markets in financial instruments directive, MiFID, to improve the markets area. The deposit guarantee issue must be revisited. It is clear from our contributions earlier that the deposit guarantee scheme is in some way integrated with the funding arrangements for resolution. We hope to bring this resolution to Council agreement and to get it into Parliament negotiations before the end of our Presidency and to reactivate the deposit guarantee scheme at the same time.

There are other priorities. I mentioned market abuse. We have made progress in the area of protection for mortgage holders under the mortgage credit directive, which we hope to conclude. We are moving to improve provisions for central securities depositors on the market. There is UCITS directive, on which we will focus. We are also trying to introduce provisions on retail investments on behalf of consumers. There is a full range of financial legislative framework measures that we are dealing with, and we hope to be as successful as we can. We hope to conclude many more financial dossiers and as a result improve the financial framework within which we operate.