Mr. Maurice Crowley:

That is a fair question. In some ways it is necessarily bank funded because I am not sure anyone else is going to offer to fund it.

The chairman of the board of the banking culture board has been appointed, Mr. Justice Hedigan, and his first job, on which he is currently engaged, is the constitution and appointment of a board. Bankers will be in a minority on that board and the majority will be all other forms of stakeholders. That is front and central and the way it should be. It is the right way to do it and is critical in its own right. At the same time, in parallel, the board will be looking for a full time chief executive and I understand that will happen in the first half of this year. The board will have a majority of non-bank people involved in it and that is right.

Reference was made to expedited timelines in the context of SEAR but the banking culture board has not been standing idly by. It has, with help from the UK's banking standards board, conducted a survey of staff in the five main banks, to which it received 14,000 replies, seeking their views of the culture within their organisations and within the sector. Separately from that, it had extensive consultations with all forms of stakeholders, public and private, across the economy over the second half of last year. My understanding is that during the second quarter of this year, it will publish the outcomes, in aggregate terms, of the staff surveys and the engagement it has had with the various stakeholders. Ultimately, my understanding is that a number of the non-bank stakeholders with which it engaged will actually sit on the board of the banking culture board. Thereafter one would expect, although this is a decision for the board, that it would publish an annual report reflecting the findings of various engagements each year, just like the banking standards board in the UK. The findings of the banking culture board will not be a secret at the end of the day and the board will also make recommendations for action at an industry level.