Mr. Raymond Byrne:

As to how we compare with other countries on white-collar or corporate crime, as far as the consequences of the financial crash and the banking collapse are concerned, what is of some interest is that, looking back now, a number of very senior people in banking institutions were prosecuted under our existing flawed legislation. Some of them have received significant prison sentences. Let us compare this with the situation in other countries. We sometimes think about the United States and Mr. Madoff in this regard. Mr. Madoff pleaded guilty to certain crimes but, by comparison, in terms of the size of some of the other countries we are looking at, there have been very few prosecutions of very senior bankers.

In fact, some of those countries began with the idea of having only financial settlements. We have made recommendations that regulators ought to have the ability to impose significant financial sanctions on corporate entities. In Ireland, what happened is that some of the more significant resourcing was put into criminal prosecutions and resulted in criminal convictions. There have been some convictions, very recently in relation to some of the rate-fixing scandals in the UK but they came very late to that. It is not that I want to give us all a pat on the back of our heads, as it were, but at the same time we should not say that nothing was done in terms of white-collar crime.

There is no doubt that there is an issue around resourcing. The commission is not competent to talk about what level of resourcing the Garda or the regulators ought to have, but as I mentioned before, that is certainly something that we said must be part of the equation, that is, the appropriate resourcing of bodies if they are being set up by legislation. If a new entity is being created out of the old ODCE then a major question has to be the appropriate resourcing. In the past, the perception was that white-collar crime or senior executives within organisations were not really being prosecuted, but there is no doubt the experience in recent years has been that there have been prosecutions and convictions and very significant resourcing. As the Director of Public Prosecutions has pointed out recently, very significant resources of her office have been spent over the past ten years in bringing those cases to trial. All those resources were put in place but it is another question as to whether there are sufficient resources to address all of the issues that arise. There is no doubt that those trials that did go to conviction were very expensive trials, but the State did spend considerable resources in that area.