Mr. Brian Patterson:

At the time, principles-based regulation seemed to be the right thing to do. That was heavily influenced by the fact that everybody was doing it, bar I think the US and maybe Germany and rules-based regulation did not work too well for them either. So it was the generally accepted international best practice, all right, and as such I suppose it was accepted without enough question by everybody. I became part of that groupthink, if you want to call it that. Did my view change over the years? No it didn't. Did it change subsequently? Yes it did, because we can now see clearly that number one, it wasn't up to the job. The whole of Europe sees that now and has changed the way they regulate and also particularly I think in the case of Ireland, it wasn't backed by sufficient intrusion because you can have rules and you can have principles and you can have different levels of intrusion with both. We had principles-based regulation with not a lot of intrusion and that wasn't correct.