Professor Patrick Honohan:

One area that I'm not fully confident about is the area of entities which are not, at present, subject to regulation because they are just there. They are not doing things that are subject to European or Irish law in requiring them to be regulated. And we have opened a body of work to try to, first of all, collect data and require such companies to provide data to us so that we can start to understand them and we have already been doing this for about two years. And then in case of firms which we have no right to ask for them for data, we have been going to a sample of firms and trying by nature by means of in-depth interview to understand what line of business are they in to see should there be some additional legislative requirement at the European or Irish level? And in doing this, we are feeding this information into the European, especially the European but also the international system. Because this area of non-bank, non-insurance finance is growing because banks are being more strictly regulated. The flows of money are going out into unregulated entities and we want to make sure that that's not going to cause a problem.