Mr. Ian Drennan:

I know Mr. Farrell and he is happy to be provocative. In fairness, those comments were delivered in a particular context.

On a serious note, I need to make an important point that sometimes gets lost in the narrative. None of the investigations that we were involved in related in any way to collapse or the issues that gave rise to the collapse of Anglo Irish Bank or any other bank. Bar one, they were all issues that manifested themselves in the dying days of that organisation, for example, the share support scheme. They were particular, if you like, end-of-life issues. It is a common misperception but the individuals in question, in fairness to them, were not on trial for bringing Ireland to its knees or for bringing the banking crisis. That is not the purpose of the company law charges. Indeed, there were other charges as a consequence of Garda investigations which were similarly not for that purpose.

That brings me neatly to the Law Reform Commission report. I heard the Senator speak of it on the previous occasion and it is clearly something he has studied careful. I could talk to the Senator about that report all day. Implicit in the very fact that there was a recommendation in that report that this idea of egregiously reckless lending should be criminalised is a recognition that what happened, albeit unpalatable, was not necessarily criminal. That is probably what brought them to that point. I will come back to the Law Reform Commission, LRC, in a minute.

Given that Senator Mac Lochlainn referenced Dr. Byrne, he may be aware that one of the other limbs to the Government's package of white collar measures that accompany the proposed Bill that we are discussing today was the establishment of a group under the former DPP, Mr. Jim Hamilton. Myself and Mr. Hegarty sit on that committee and, indeed, Dr. Byrne is a member of that committee. If the Senator does not have the terms of reference, we can get them for him - there is no difficulty with that. Some of the issues the Senator touched on are some of the issues that we are looking at within that committee. That committee, the Senator can take it as a given, will have the benefit of Dr. Byrne's perspective on those issues. We can send the terms of reference through to the Senator tomorrow.

Returning to the LRC report, as I said, I am quite happy to talk to the Senator about that all day. I certainly have particular views on chapter 1 of that report which deals with the ODCE. While I take no pleasure in saying so, there are a number of quite significant errors in that chapter. Indeed, some of the analysis contained in that chapter, specifically, around DPP v. FitzPatrick, is not supported by the facts and is demonstrative of a certain lack of understanding of some of the issues involved in that.

As a separate issue, there is a disconnect in that the report starts out saying we had a financial crisis and we need to identify a mechanism whereby we ensure that we as a State never repeat that financial crisis, then seems to take a quantum leap into DPP v. FitzPatrick which had nothing to do with that - I said earlier that trial had nothing to do with causes of the financial crisis - and then seeks to leverage off certain deficiencies in that as a means of recommending the creation of a corporate crime agency. We would have some quite significant observations around the level of analysis or otherwise that underpin that recommendation. First and foremost, in the report the LRC stated that it endorses the vehicle that is in the proposed Bill notwithstanding that this agency that we are talking about is an entity that will continue to have the same functions as the ODCE, namely, company law, but then goes on to talk about corporate crime, which is a much broader remit. The first difficulty is that whereas the report discusses at length the issue of corporate crime, it does not define it anywhere. It, in some instances, likens it to fraud, then likens it to white collar crime and then it likens it to corporate crime, all of which mean different things. If one takes that at its broadest - white collar crime is even wider - let us leave it at corporate crime, that is, any crime that involves a corporate entity. That includes everything from company law to, say, tax evasion of VAT in a pub or something like that, or to a company that owns the building site whereby the trench collapses on some poor unfortunate, to the company that constructed Grenfell Tower, the MS Herald of Free Enterpriseor whatever the case may be to a company that is being used as a moneylaundering vehicle. We issued a press statement about this some considerable time ago. The breadth of the scope is enormous.

Are we going to denude Revenue, the ODCE, the Health and Safety Authority, etc., of their enforcement activities and put these into one entity or is the corporate crime agency to do the more serious corporate crime and the other entities continue to do what they are doing, in which case the Revenue Commissioners, for one, would certainly have a view in terms of the implications that would have for its intelligence gathering?

There is a very obvious issue in that if, for example, one sets up a corporate crime agency and its mandate is to deal with more serious corporate crime, I can predict - it is fairly close to a fact - it would become a dumping ground because anybody who does criminal investigation and who wants to get rid of a difficult case or one that will be contentious would merely refer it across to it. That is as sure as night follows day. It is a recommendation that is worthy of consideration, but one that requires a lot more thought.