Professor Patrick Honohan:

No, I think that very complex structure that was put in place ... you could quite clearly see the danger that exactly happened. I didn't, obviously, foresee it but it was obvious that this structure did not make sense. But it wasn't the cause of the crisis. They have the powers and so on and so forth.

So, we have now ... we have a system which is still quite complex and, in fact, has become a little bit more complex because of the euro system, the SSM role, and you can see them struggling in the euro system ... us struggling with quite similar issues. The supervisory board being separate from the governing council but in that case they have protected it. The governing council takes all the final decisions. The supervisory board, which is the one that Cyril Roux sits on for Ireland, they do all the donkey work but it's not as in our former structure here that they didn't have to refer to the Central Bank board. They do in the ECB.

I think we've ... one issue which I've been very attentive to is that because of the SSM's rules, the risk of a barrier in information between the banking supervision and the rest of the Central Bank re-emerged, so we're being very careful that we collect the information in such a way and under such authorities that the necessary information can still flow to the Central Bank.