Professor Patrick Honohan:

So, obviously, when Mark Carney speaks it gets bigger headlines than when I speak, but I do recall at one of the committees - the finance committee - several years ago by now, pointing to similar legislation in Australia, which I invited the legislators to pay attention to. I'm very much in favour of this approach. Cyril Roux was here a couple of weeks ago with you and he said he was sceptical about the effectiveness of fines in ... and I think that's true. I think it very much comes down to individuals. If we're talking about reckless behaviour and negligence, it comes down to individuals. And if individuals are not at risk, then, I think, you're liable to get a number of bad apples. Matthew Elderfield has also spoken about this and he actually shared with me some material that he provided to the ... to the committee and I would endorse what he said. He said that before in public as well ... that it's not just that there's new legislation in Britain. Yes, that's something that we could copy but I think it goes deeper than that. And he's convinced me, and my other colleagues have also convinced me, that we have developed in Ireland, perhaps because of our history and our post-colonial history, we have developed a ... a great potential ... protection of the individual which makes it very, very difficult to believe that there are sanctions in place. So it's very many steps. So I'm very much in favour of more work being done on this, it's not Central Bank business. I understand that the Law Reform Commission is looking into this business of white collar crime and whether our sentencing practices, our procedures and ... you know, what are the all the big reforms that might be needed to make this effective.