Ms Geraldine Kennedy:

It was not sufficiently independent. The Senator probably knows where it operates. It operates on the very same floor in the very same building of the Central Bank. It was known to have been created to do what was called soft-touch regulation. If one was going to bother appointing a regulator at all, one would give it authority and powers. We did not know then how much it would have been needed. I put that point in here because I anticipated that the committee would ask how The Irish Timescould be independent with the chairman of the regulatory authority on its board. We were independent. That is a very good example for the committee. He would not have been that happy with these views and he would have spoken to me, saying that we had got all that wrong and everything like that, yet we maintained our position in the interests of our readers.