Mr. Charlie McCreevy:

I think, Deputy, we ... Senator, we could have a discussion maybe another day over this. There'll be a whole variety of reasons. I said ... I mentioned earlier about low interest rate policies but if I can say one thing about ... I said competition among the banks, which we all thought, in Ireland, was a very good thing. And, as you rightly have ... over your long career as an academic have advocated competition, and competition is a good thing, but in certain areas, too much competition can be a very bad thing because you can't compete to the lower base, financial products being one of them. Auditing on price can be a bad thing as well because you can compete all the time on price for auditing ... you may end up with a very, very low base. So, therefore, competition has been recognised as being a very good thing and, as you well know, all of my political career I have been pro-competition, but in certain areas it can lead to these problems and, as I said earlier, the competition, not alone among Irish banks, but banks from the outside contributed to the lessening of credit standards being applied by banks.

And one final thing, may I say, if I was to ... from my experience in Brussels, and looking across what happened in the financial sector throughout Europe and throughout the world, the remuneration policies of financial institutions have led, in my view, to a lot of these difficulties. Very ... we'll make it very simple, here is bank A over here, led by a very conservative chairman, chief executive, lending officers etc., in business for 60 years, doing a nice ... doing a nice dividend at the end of the year for their shareholders. Along comes bank B over here, bright new sparks, new chief executive, incentivisation and bonus shares etc. etc. Profits keep going up and up and up. Every year at their annual meeting, old Mr. Fogey over here, "Why aren't your profits going up and up compared to bank B over here?" What happens, out is turfed conservative Mr. A and his team. In come a whole lot of new whizz kids anyway and they're going to compete for more and more business, because they are being remunerated on results. And everybody's being remunerated on results, including the Government. The Government is being remunerated because they're going to get increased taxation and corporate taxation plus PAYE etc. etc. The shareholders are going to get more and more dividends. The employees are going to get more wages and more salaries and more bonuses baked in share schemes. And this cycle keeps going. And if you were to look across the world, not just Ireland, you will see that is one common denominator. Now, I'm making a comment, which I probably didn't intend to do, because it's post my time as Minister for Finance.