Professor Niamh Hardiman:

In a banking context I have no observations at all to make directly on that. What I would say is that it really is the structured set of relationships that is important. It does not even necessarily have to be the case that banks lobby to get their interests attended to by Government for them to be very important players in the political process.

It is these structured relationships between different interests that I want to flag and I am suggesting government needs to have the capacity to establish a distance in policy formation processes from powerful social interests. That involves scrutiny and deliberation of competing policy proposals and a critical analysis or evaluation of the priorities being followed in economic policy. I have mentioned previously what we now see to be inappropriate fiscal incentives and as an inappropriately loose stance in allowing a great deal of credit to be built up in the Irish economy, but these were policy decisions Governments took. We do not have to look for and it would probably be impossible to find any instance of specific lobbying that resulted in these policy decisions being taken. It is the policy structure that is the problem and we really want to try to understand how we can do better.