Mr. Matt Carthy:

-----have given them. In cases where there have been systemic failures at a member state level, it is unlikely that that Government would have given the powers to somebody else to prevent them from having those failures in the first instance. It creates a level of extreme frustration when we know, for example, the ECB's role in terms of our own crisis period. I would argue it played a very destructive role in terms of the troika and the bailout programme. We know of the telephone call about bombs going off in Dublin, and the letters Mr. Trichet sent to our Minister for Finance at the time. It is very frustrating when we know the impact they have had on Ireland's economy for the ECB to simply reply, when we say, "By the way, these banks that you forced us to bail out are now treating our citizens with absolute disdain" that there is nothing it can do about that and that we should go back to our Central Bank.

The accountability of the ECB is to the European Parliament and both myself and Mr. Hayes would have engaged on that. It is a much different scenario from that which exists today, for example, because Mario Draghi comes in and a small number of MEPs are selected to have a five-minute interaction with him, which means that if one spends four minutes asking the question, he has one minute to respond. It is very difficult to draw out the answers.

To return to the point I made earlier, I strongly believe there are mechanisms to address at a national level the issues of the tracker mortgages and the other failures in terms of banks, including the issue of some overcharging by banks.

We need to be big and bold enough to claim them. We need to move ahead in putting in place the proper protections for whistleblowers, not only here but also across the European Union.