Ms Mary Burke:

From my perspective, it was ... at an operational level, it was a resources issue. We didn't then, I beg your pardon, have a separate enforcement directorate as we have now. We actually have a directorate with two enforcement departments who in fairness carry ... do Trojan work and carry the lion's share of responsibility in terms of taking a sanction and pushing it through. Sanctions ... you know, the initiation and the pursuit and the successful conclusion of sanctions, which is a very time-consuming process, was left with the supervision departments. It wasn't peculiar to banking supervision.

It was the same if you had investment firms, or funds, or whatever, insurance, it was the same and we didn't have, in either of the two departments I was in, the resources to divert people that ... from doing the day job of supervision to, say, take time out, which would have been a number of people, for weeks on end, to pursue a sanctions case and, as I said to Deputy Doherty earlier, in as early as '05, the banking supervision department - that was before my time - in its policy had indicated it did not have the resources to pursue a sanctions case.