Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I will finish on this point. I appreciate that the recommendations that are being put forward by the Law Reform Commission add to our toolkit and strengthen our hand in relation to ensuring that criminal activity in institutions or at an individual level can be prosecuted, which will hopefully act as a deterrent. That being said, I still believe the measures are quite weak. I accept the witnesses have spoken about individual accountability but we are currently able to prosecute individuals who should have acted or taken notice or for whom alarm bells should have rung in relation to their specific functions within a financial institution. I am only a layperson but the problem as I see it is that their activities are not illegal. This goes back to the fact that if we had a banker before us, we could say he or she should not have done this or that but there is no sanction in the law for doing it. There was nothing wrong with a banker going to a hotel down the road and giving a cheque to a developer for €230 million without any proper scrutiny as to whether that was appropriate or if it would make the bank go bust. We are told that despite €1 billion having to be returned to individuals in the tracker scandal, there was really nothing wrong in it. The problem with holding individuals to account is that if we continue to say that the practices that are happening or could potentially happen in the future are okay, what is the point? If an individual accepts responsibility for something and says that it was his or her call, so what? It can be described as an administrative error and every bank made the same administrative error but that is just coincidence. I appreciate that this is a step forward but I am not convinced. When I look at two of the major financial scandals we have had to endure in the past decade, namely, the collapse of some of the banks and the way in which lending operated, I am not convinced that the introduction of the measures outlined would result in more bankers being jailed as a result of their conduct. Likewise, I do not know whether anybody would go to prison or would even be sacked. Nobody has been sacked and a number of people have even been promoted within the banks following the tracker scandal. I am not sure that this cuts it, but I appreciate that it gives extra teeth. We are ten years on from the scandal. While we have changed laws and increased regulation, that fact that we have still not dealt with individual accountability in financial institutions screams loudly about the establishment and how it is protecting institutions.

I will leave it at that, but I would like to hear the witnesses' response to see if they can convince me that I am wrong and that this report is the bee's knees. If, God help us, we ever have to go through what we went through in the last decade at least there would be accountability because that is what this is about.