Professor Patrick Honohan:

We hired a lot of people. We hired a lot of very able people at all levels. So already the appointment process for the head of financial regulation, which was still the chief executive role at that stage under that legislation, was well advanced and it was down to just a shortlist of people so we hired a very good person there. And then with his help we headhunted some people and we just advertised other people and we made a raft of senior appointments and then we bolstered the staff right through the organisation. So 2010-'11 shows a huge increase in the actual numbers of staff that we had, not just the approved numbers which went even higher and we never actually reached the higher approved numbers. We, sort of, paused before we reached that, but it's a very big increase.

So, I mean, the numbers from ... if I take the Central Bank as a whole, combining the Central Bank and the Financial Regulator, in ... end of 2009 ... was 1,045.6 people and two years later, at 1,372.7 people. The Financial Regulator went from 379 to 622.