Professor Niamh Hardiman:

I would make a distinction between the mode of regulation specifically in the financial sector and in State agencies more generally. The design of the regulatory system in the financial sector is not that important - whether we had one regulator or the two-headed regulation system - but it could have been made to work better. Professor Patrick Honohan's report suggested lines of accountability were not always clear and that some oversight issues might have fallen through the cracks between the two bodies. If true, that would be a problem, but the real problem was the manner in which financial regulation was implemented. I see this as separate from the growth in new agencies and the creation of an ever greater number of new agencies during the 2000s, especially in the second half of that decade. I led a research project in UCD that gave rise to the Irish State administration database, which is an interesting and very useful research tool. We document every State agency created since the foundation of the State, categorised according to multiple criteria, and can show when and where different agencies were created.