Mr. Stephen Groarke:

There are two dimensions at play. I was not at that meeting at the Department of Finance, but my understanding is that the context of that discussion was the examination of whether there was any conspiracy at an industry level - or indeed ill-intent - or to discover whether there were operational issues where things had gone wrong in the operations of the bank. As I understand it, no evidence was found of a conspiracy at industry level. At bank level, no evidence of ill-intent was found. In that context, the conversation turned to operational issues. It is very clear that the bank did not have the correct standards, processes or governance in place, and much of that has had to be put in place since 2012 when the new management team was installed. It would be a very high bar indeed to assume that any individual would have recognised, in the period from 2006 to 2010, that those governance standards which are now commonplace should have been in place. They clearly were not in place in Permanent TSB. Neither were they in place in peer banking institutions. There would have been no benchmark for an individual to say that those governance standards should have been imposed because there was not sufficient realisation across the entire industry that these standards needed to be in place. That is why this is being treated as a systems and operational error as opposed to being a matter of individuals seeking to overcharge customers.