Ciarán Lynch (Cork South Central, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I ... I don't suffer from the same thing ... or I don't actually have it, I suffer from the quite the opposite because I'm misnaming members of this committee at times and all the rest of it. But I tend to recall that there was a ... maybe a conflict might be too strong a word, but there seemed to have been a strong position coming from your Department and a strong position coming from Minister McCreevy's Department, and maybe you could elaborate was that actually a conflict? Was it an issue as to whether the regulator's office, because there was a lot of issues relating to consumer affairs and consumer protection, that it should be moved into your office? Was there something that you would try to appropriate the regulator's ... or some of their functions and duties, as something that is an enterprise and trade related issue? And also ... or was it that really we shouldn't be separating and fragmenting the role of the regulator? We've had testimony here from Mr. Cyril Roux recently who more or less said that what the ... in summary, that every country had principles-based regulation but it just seemed to have been operated differently in Ireland. Was there an indication of that concern, that if the regulator was kind of put out in that regards, that's something else? I mean, if you could just explain to us what the narrative of this discussion actually is between yourself and Mr. McCreevy.