Ciarán Lynch (Cork South Central, Labour) | Oireachtas source

The Joint Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis is resuming in public session. Next on the agenda is our discussion with Professor Philip Lane from Trinity College Dublin. Our guest is a professor of international macroeconomics and director of the Institute of International Integration Studies at Trinity. He received a doctorate in economics from Harvard University in 1995 and was an assistant professor of economics and international affairs at Colombia University between 1995 and 1997 before moving to Trinity College in that year.

He is a research fellow of the Centre of Economic Policy Research and has been a visiting scholar at the International Monetary Fund and the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, and a consultant to the European Commission.

His research interests include international macro-economics, economic growth, European monetary union and Irish economic performance. He is a managing editor of the Economic and Social Reviewand is also on the editorial boards of the Journal of the European Economic Association, the International Journal of Central Banking, Open Economies Reviewand Economics and Politics.

Professor Lane has been invited here today to discuss the Irish banking crisis, and economic and monetary union.

Before we begin, I wish to advise the witness that by virtue of section 17(2)(l) of the Defamation Act 2009, witnesses are protected by absolute privilege in respect of their evidence to this committee. If they are directed by the Chairman to cease giving evidence in relation to a particular matter and continue to do so, they are entitled thereafter only to a qualified privilege in respect of their evidence. They are directed that only evidence connected with the subject matter of these proceedings be given. The witness has been informed previously that the committee asks witnesses to refrain from discussing named individuals in this phase of the inquiry.

Members are reminded of the long-standing ruling of the Chair to the effect that members should not comment upon, criticise or make charges against a person outside the House or an official by name, or in such a way as to make him or her identifiable.

I now invite Professor Lane to make his opening remarks.