Mr. Gary Tobin:

I thank the Senator for his questions. In terms of cash, I would not want to give the impression that we, as in the Department, necessarily want to move to a completely cashless society. We recently published a study entitled Benchmarking Payments in Ireland that assessed where Ireland is in terms of moving towards a cashless society. The main finding is that we are moving there relatively quickly. A lot of that is positive but one of the potential negatives is that we are going to become ever more reliant on technology. The one thing one can be sure about technology is that it is great when it works but it is not so great when it does not work. One of the takeaways for us in terms of the review is that we still feel that cash needs to remain as an option for people to use. We are also very conscious that there may be certain members of society, for a variety of reasons, who may want to use cash and not go completely digital.

In terms of the question about the role of the Department as shareholder versus legislating for regulation, we are mindful that it is really important that we, as a Department, do not become captured by the sector. That is why we have very deliberately split responsibility for the shareholder function away from the banking policy function. My colleagues and I work on banking policy. We have responsibility for working on the regulatory framework for the banks and working on issues such as the banking culture. We have a completely separate unit led by my colleague, Mr. Des Carville, who looks after the shareholding function. We have Chinese walls because there are different divisions within the Department with different responsibilities. We think it is important that those two functions are separate so that we, on the policy side, and please excuse the expression, are not contaminated by the role of shareholder.