Mr. Gary Tobin:

As the Secretary General highlighted, we have deliberately split responsibility within the Department between the shareholder division and the banking policy division. There is a Chinese wall between the two, for all the reasons Mr. Moran gave. The banks operate on a commercial basis and their individual independence is protected by the relationship frameworks, which are legally binding documents. The Department does not interfere in the commercial decision making of the individual banks.

In terms of the tracker mortgage investigation, it is probably the most complex investigation the Central Bank has ever undertaken. There has been €665 million of redress given out to customers to date. Our focus is to try to ensure that what happened with tracker mortgages does not happen again. One of the key ways in which the Minister and the Government are proposing to do that is through the Central Bank (amendment) Bill, which is being brought forward. The legislation will have three key elements, one of which is the introduction of a senior executive accountability regime, SEAR, for senior managers in the banks that will allow us to pinpoint who is responsible for what function in advance in individual banks. It can be argued that through the crisis, it was not clear exactly who was responsible for which particular part of the disastrous decision that led to X, Y or Z. The SEAR is designed to overcome that. There will also be new conduct standards for all financial services firms and enhancements to the fitness and probity regime and the enforcement regime. There will, as a result, be a greater number of rules in place, which will, we hope, ensure that some of the activities we saw through the crisis, including in respect of tracker mortgages, will not happen again.