Mr. Charlie McCreevy:

Well, I did see in the reports of the committee where Mr. Patterson had said ... referred to some discussion we'd had when he was appointed the chairperson of IFSRA. I don't recall the particular discussion but I know ... if Mr. Patterson said that, that's what he said. I take it that's what did occur. And, as I said in my opening statement and in my witness statement as well, all the ... in setting up the new structure, you can look at all of the Dáil debates and all of the Seanad debates and all of the commentary and you'll see all this concentration on consumer issues to the exclusion of nearly everything else. And bar myself and, once or twice the Front Bench spokesperson of Fine Gael, referring to the prudential area of things, that was about the only discussion you'll read at all about prudential in all of the debates on two Bills ... not alone the two Bills but all the four years that went by before we actually set up the bodies at all and all of the controversy there was about the difference between us and the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment, about where the location of new bodies should be.

When it came to the appointment, I actually ... I can't remember how Mr. Patterson came to be appointed. I certainly never knew him. I never knew him in any walk of life. So I assume he must've came up through a process that maybe the Department of Finance or the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment pursued at that time. We did try to ensure when we set up the body CBFSAI, the Central Bank of Ireland and Financial Services Regulatory Authority, we had them ... IFSRA here ... and we had the broader body then. We did have, I think, about six members of the IFSRA on all - including the chief executive chairman - on the board of the larger body as well. And that was done in order to accommodate and to meld the two organisations together because there'd be a lot of controversy about setting up this in the first place. But regarding the individual appointments, some of these people that ... if I can recall, were appointed to the board of the Central Bank by non-Fianna Fáil-led Governments. Exactly one person-----