Mr. Ed Sibley:

On the credit risk point, the issue is not of the scale that we saw previously. It is important to note that the level of intervention and intrusiveness of our work, particularly through the inspection activity, is designed to identify these issues at an early stage. We have identified issues that cause us concern and they are highlighted in the opening statement. However, we are not sitting here doing nothing about them. We are requiring that those behaviours be addressed and ultimately aiming to improve the culture of the banks.

In connection with information technology, while this issue is not unique to Ireland, the banks here had to deal with fundamental issues in terms of their survival for a number of years and were highly constrained in terms of the levels of investment they could make. This has put them behind where they need to be in terms of their IT infrastructure, both in terms of their ability to serve the needs of their customers as we move forward into new technologies and new ways of doing business and in terms of their infrastructure resilience so that their systems continue to operate with near 100% availability, and also in terms of the cyber-threat to which Professor Lane referred. They have a common need - certainly many of the banks that are focused on the domestic sector - to invest more heavily in IT than they have heretofore.