Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Thursday, 23 April 2015
Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis
Nexus Phase
Mr. Dermot Gleeson:
Well, when I heard it first I thought this is ... "Is this serious?" And then we were reassured that it wasn't and when I looked and, to be honest with you, I tried to look at this recently, when I looked at the way it was couched in their own terms and then, if you follow, the issue, as you know, was sectoral concentration, and the reason that they were relaxed, the reason that we were relaxed, frankly, about it was this: this was a standard which lumped a whole lot of non-homogenous properties together. You know, ten acres with no zoning outside a provincial town was treated the same as an office block in the centre of Warsaw or Dublin leased to the Government. So it was a crude, if you like, I say ... we would have been blessed if we had kept to it, or it would have helped us, but that was the case, and if you look at the Financial Regulator's reports in 2010, 2011 and 2012, they said this is a very complex issue.
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