Mr. Tom O'Malley:

The Deputy has made a very eloquent point. I am not saying this is the last word; perhaps other criminal offences could be thought of. We must remember this gets down to a very basic policy question about the reach we wish to have in the criminal law, as opposed to other aspects of law. One of the constraints under which the Oireachtas operates when it comes to defining new criminal offences is that under the Constitution and under the European Convention on Human Rights, every criminal offence must be clearly and specifically defined. There is a right to fair labelling and fair warning so that a person can know in advance precisely what is permitted by law and precisely what is prohibited by law. Therefore any criminal offence that is created must be sufficiently clearly defined so that a person can look it at advance and say, "If I do this I am within the law; if I do that I am outside the law." I am not suggesting that the kinds of issues the Deputy is raising could not be accommodated within a properly defined criminal offence; I am just saying that is one of the challenges that will always have to be addressed. It is purely a matter of fairness as much as anything else.

Going back to the previous point, as opposed to the one the Deputy just mentioned, as a general policy for deterring criminal conduct on the part of people working in the financial sector, which is really what we want to do, the combination of the corporate offence and the personal liability that might attach to individual officers and so on should be quite effective. I say should be quite effective in the sense that obviously the only penalty that can be imposed on a corporate entity, in effect, is a financial penalty, a fine, whereas of course if dealing with human defendants who are convicted of offences, clearly the penalties can be much more onerous through imprisonment and so forth. One would hope that the combination of these two - that a company may be very severely punished with a financial penalty and that individuals within the company may find themselves suffering deprivation of liberty as well as deprivation of property - should be fairly effective.