Professor Patrick Honohan:

Yes. So, we changed everything really. I mean, one of the ... one of my best decisions, if you like, was to recommend to the ... recommend to the board of the Central Bank the appointment of Matthew Elderfield, who was such a together person, with enough experience of a well-organised regulatory structure and the dynamism and management skills to make it happen, and so he mapped out, from the word go ... and he was in 1 January 2010, but he ... we were already talking to each other in the previous months. He mapped out, first of all staffing. He said "You're way understaffed and you've got to separate the functions". Take enforcement, which is the question you're asking me, Chathaoirligh, enforcement has to be taken right away from supervision. Of course, they have to talk to each other, the supervisors will feed the enforcers with information, but take it right away so that once the job has been identified, that there's a breach here that has to be followed up and pursued, that that will not now contaminate the day-to-day examination of ... forward-looking examination, and is taken to a directorate where specialist skills are applied to documenting the breach, deciding whether it's sufficient to warrant ... or what kind of action is warranted and then pursuing it. I would say, I know you're ... this is an area where I'm really surprised at how procedurally heavy the law makes it, in ... to go from the step where you say "That bank did this and they shouldn't have done that and they should pay a sanction of €5 million for it", the steps to be taken from there to there are very, very heavy. And, it also applies to sanctions against individuals, even more so, and so that's why some of these things go on for years.