Mr. Brendan Halligan:

Question No. 2 is composited from a number of members, but mainly questions submitted by Blair Horan, a trade union member of the institute. It reads:

As part of the architecture of the single currency, the treaty provided in Article 127(6) for the Council in defined circumstances to confer specific tasks concerning policies relating to the prudential supervision of credit institutions and other financial institutions to the ECB. Do you consider, President Trichet, that the banking crisis in Ireland would have been avoided if the ECB had been given this responsibility when the euro was established in 1999?