Mr. Raymond Byrne:

That would be a bit outside what the commission looked at in its report. One of many things that did happen after 2008 is that, not just at national level, very significant new powers were given in 2010 and, following that, in 2013 to the Central Bank. Also at EU level issues around the supervisory mechanism that now comes out of the European Central Bank where the pillar banks are being looked at very closely including where rules about the capital ratios and the ratios that the banks actually hold. Those have certainly been strengthened at EU and international level. So there have been significant responses.

One could say two things. The next crisis may not be in financial services but that in so far as the regulatory system both at national level and at EU level in terms of the single supervisory mechanism reforms, those have certainly strengthened the capacity to intervene earlier before there would be a collapse. There is specific legislation in the financial services area to deal with liquidation of our banks and before that actually happens, to address issues like capital ratio. I cannot say in particular that the commission examined that issue. However, we have been very conscious as we went through our analysis that a huge number of reforms had taken place.

The other aspect of this is of course that in terms of the regulators that are involved in enforcing financial and economic regulation in Ireland, our analysis was that they all needed a core set of regulatory tools. The ones that we mentioned in the submission to the committee would have been the ones where we felt there was a gap in some of those regulators. That would be something that we found from the literature. That is quite important in terms of prevention.