Mr. Paul Egan:

I can answer half of the Senator's first question. With regard to the resources of the Garda, I have no information and I would not be competent to respond on that. The question was if we are soft on corporate crime. The bit that I can speak about is whether I believe that the law we have in Ireland is of a high standard compared with OECD international standards. I am of the view that it is. There are a number of threads that feed into this answer. First, the 2014 Act was the result of an exhaustive section by subsection analysis of all of our existing company law. Historically, we used to copy what the UK did and sometimes we would just copy it almost word for word. More and more, the law that we have in terms of our company law, securities law and insolvency law is in fact generated in the EU. That is not to say it is up to the EU to do it, but there is a rigour in the drafting of the law. In terms of the companies Bill, if we go back to the report on company law and enforcement from 1998, one of its recommendations was that at least once every two years there would be a companies Bill just to do a bit of catch-up and this is an example of that in terms of all the little tweaks and fixes that are being done. I believe that the statute law that we have and the whole body of companies legislation we have stands up to scrutiny and any comparison.