Professor Patrick Honohan:

Everything would have been fine. No. We have introduced these compliance statements now and so on, but it is kind of funny because the whole approach to regulation was relying on good governance of banks and this was a little piece of the jigsaw of that good governance and they were not prepared to put it in. It suggests a lack of coherence. I have to say that around that time there were similar measures - it is not the same story - such as the Sarbanes-Oxley measures requiring statements of this kind. It was a very controversial territory. It is not surprising that they shied away from it in the end.