Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 22 July 2015
Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis
Nexus Phase
Mr. John Dunne:
Well, I mean, that's true up to a point too but there are ... there's an opaqueness around this question. For example, if you take the issue of 100% mortgages. I was always of the view, right from the very beginning, that we didn't have the power to ban 100% mortgages. Now, that view has been challenged in subsequent hindsight discussion. But my view was that if we wanted to ban it, then we really needed to go to the Government to get powers because we didn't have the power to control the development of particular product lines within the banking institutions. Now, we could have got around it. Although, I have to confess, I didn't appreciate this until this inquiry started. We could have got around it by using the consumer code but we didn't think about that at the time. And so that's an example of a power that I believed would have been appropriate but we didn't have. But I think the-----
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