Mr. Tom Considine:

Well, the model ... the model that we had - and, you know, I know it has been criticised in some of these reports - was effectively that the Department of Finance and the Minister were essentially responsible for putting in place a structure to manage the financial system, including to regulate it. And, if you look at, say, the 2003 Act that set up the regulator, you would see in that there are clear structures set in place, functions assigned to the board of the regulator, their strategy statement required to be submitted to the Minister, laid before both Houses of the Oireachtas, performance reports and so on - the same thing. So that was how we operated. We are a small country and we ... one of the difficulties that we had down through the years in finance, was retaining people with financial expertise and, essentially, that's why the NTMA was set up in 1990. We couldn't keep people in the Department because the wages that we were paying were so much below what was paid-----