Seán Sherlock (Cork East, Labour) | Oireachtas source

In fairness to Mr. Coleman, he referred to FinTech earlier. That has the potential to be a game-changer around how business is done. This leads me then to seek a perspective from the witnesses on the existence of the European supervisory authorities, the Single Supervisory Mechanism for instance. If a company in the UK is thinking of moving outside of the city of London for instance, and I do not confine that to a geographical space but rather the city of London as we know it, if they are thinking of moving to Dublin they presumably still have to subscribe to those rules and adhere to those two regulatory mechanisms.

I put it to the witnesses that the decision to locate in Dublin is a marginal call. It is a competition between Dublin, Paris, anywhere in Switzerland or effectively anywhere across Europe. The decision to move to Ireland may not necessarily be predicated only on the skill-set. I have worked in banking myself and anyone smart can be trained within a short eight-week window. There is not necessarily a need for a long apprenticeship, anybody can be trained in any country with the right type of approach. My point is that the call to move to Dublin could be predicated on quality of life indicators as much as regulatory or prudential supervisory ones. There is no certainty about this whatsoever, we are still in a nebulous space because the political negotiations are nowhere near getting down into the nitty-gritty yet. If we are talking about winning jobs post-Brexit, however, the decision to move to Dublin would not necessarily be predicated on the financial culture but more on the question: can my employees live, work and exist in this city? That is as much a decision on the call to move here as anything else.