Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party) | Oireachtas source

Professor Black is probably familiar with Professor David Harvey. I do not have time to quote from his book, The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism, but he referred to senior hedge fund managers getting bonuses of as much as $1 billion a year as a result of their activities in the financial markets. One can understand how that extreme level, as many people would regard it, of compensation could lead to recklessness but in the Irish case where we would not have figures of that dimension, would Professor Black say that the same type of incentive would prevail, with perhaps smaller levels of compensation?