Mr. Oliver Gilvarry:

As my colleagues from the Central Bank have outlined, the bank is still going through issues. On the points that I have raised, we are aligned on concerns about diluting the power and role of the national competent authorities in the proposed framework and moving supervision of certain parts, for example, prospectus approvals. We can definitely say we are fully aligned in terms of our desire to have the rules applied equally. From the Department's perspective, while we operate a stringent regime for applying the rules that are set out, we want a level playing field to be applied across the European Union.

On consumer protection at EU level, the European supervisory authorities, from my understanding, all have a conduct or consumer protection area within them. The issue is not one that we have considered as part of this process. Again, this flows back to the point that if this were to move back to a European level, an issue would arise regarding expertise and how it would work. However, we have not considered whether consumer protection should be included as part of this process and it was not included in the Commission's consultation paper. That did not prevent the Commission bringing forward some of the proposals but this was not in the original paper.