Professor Patrick Honohan:

From my limited knowledge, the members of the boards were people with a lot of experience and were highly considered. Boards are a big issue, as well as non-executive directors of boards. This is a point I was going to deal with. This is a problem. If there is a complex situation, it is not very easy for non-executive members of boards to get to grips with what is happening. In the case of my board, I feel very sorry for people who meet once a month, or very often twice a month with committees. There are masses of information to be digested and if something goes wrong I would be sorry to think that people would blame the non-executive directors. They can only perform a very limited oversight role.

I feel the legislation of the Central Bank - and this is the point I wanted to make - is a little bit unfair to the commission members, and the non-executive directors as it puts all the responsibility on them. They delegate responsibility but all the powers and responsibilities are with the commission. The same was true of the previous board. They cannot be on top of everything. The responsibility should lie with the senior executives and the commission members should be there as a supervisory board with the responsibility to check what is going on but not the primary responsibility.