Professor Niamh Hardiman:

The particular things that I was asked to think about in connection with engaging with the committee have to do with the banking crisis. There are other areas where sometimes the easiest response to a policy mistake is to move on and to press on with new kinds of practices and arrangements, ensuring that people who have occupied positions of responsibility are maybe moved aside, but really probing what went wrong can be problematic. In the context of the banking crisis things did go wrong in the banking sector before. There was a financial sector collapse in 1984 and I wonder if the right sort of lessons were learnt about risk that can happen inside financial institutions and the sort of oversight that may be required at that point. We know, for example, that Pat Gallagher was subject to criminal proceedings in Northern Ireland and many commentators have asked why that was or why these were not pursued in the Republic.

I do not know the answer to that question. There were questions about the financial sector in the past and questions were raised during the 2000s. The Comptroller and Auditor General raised questions about the functioning of the regulator's office during that period. German financial regulators suggested more vigilant oversight might have been desirable in the mid-2000s, but somehow these warnings and lessons were not taken on board or absorbed into a type of critical reflective practice in order that, in anticipation of things happening, measures might have been put in place ahead of time.