Mr. Fergus Murphy:

I think, Senator, that it's very important to understand the sector. So, you must ... and it's probably a challenge, or a valid criticism of banking in Ireland at a point in time that, possibly, there were directors on banks who didn't have a strong financial background. But I think you need a certain quotient, or a quorum, or a percentage of your board that have a very strong financial background, be it in insurance or be it in banking, because it is a different business to lots of other businesses. If I could for a moment, you know ... if you sell a banking product to a customer, ironically and usually, that product stays on the bank's balance sheet for five, ten, 15 or 20 years. If I sell cheese, or if I sell shoes, or if I sell whatever, once I sell it, it's gone. Now, if it wasn't a good piece of cheese, the customer will come back and say to me, "It wasn't very good" and they may not buy anymore cheese from me again. But it's very different. You sell something to somebody but it stays on your balance sheet, so that's a different industry with a different rigour around it. It's actually quite a complex industry and, therefore, I believe having financial services background and experience would be very, very important.

However, I think it's also very important to have people on the board of the Central Bank, or any other bank, that can bring a wide perspective outside of banking because one of the challenges and one of the, again, valid criticisms of banking is that we became so insular and so micro around the importance of banking that one could have forgotten what was actually happening in the real economy. And so having people with strong economic background and people with strong governance background and some people with expertise from sectors outside of banking would be the right mix. But the concentration should be on financial services expertise.