Ms Mary Harney:

-----but essentially the Department of Finance and the Central Bank took one view and everybody else probably took a different view. The Central Bank had traditionally given responsibility, or if memory serves me right and I hope it does, there was an issue around bank charges and the Central Bank referred that to the director of consumer affairs. I was anxious to ensure that there was a strong consumer focus, given what had happened. Remember, when these decisions are made they are made in an environment of what's happening at the time and, as I said earlier, I did take the opportunity to read the debate in the Oireachtas and the focus of everybody was around consumer protection and the fact that it hadn't been taken seriously heretofore.

The lesson I suppose, Chairman, is that having established a new regime we probably should have been more hands-on or more proactive in inquiring how it was progressing. But remember the backdrop then was that there were no prudential issues. There were issues raised about the expertise in the country and how limited that is, and I share that view, we are a small country. So I wasn't anxious to establish an organisation for the sake of it. What concerned me was not the shape of the body that emerged but rather what the body was going to do. And it was my genuine view, given that there was a director of corporate ... of consumer protection, a statutory consumer protection directorate, I was very happy with that.

I've seen subsequently at this committee reference was made that we didn't have a similar person for prudential regulation and perhaps the reason for that there wasn't perceived to be any issue with prudential regulation. And indeed any of the external analysis of the country, including the IMF, the OECD reports in 2006 and 2007, and the stress tests done, all gave us a very clean bill of health. That is a fact.