Ms Derville Rowland:

-----from a legal point of view. He could not take information from anybody else but he will be able to speak to that better.

I am going to talk a bit about litigation settlements and confidentiality and our approach. There are three things I should say to the committee. Being a lawyerly type formerly, I know that going to court is a really difficult thing for customers, and not everybody would want to do that. There would be good reason for people who wish to settle. Some people want to be private about that and do not want their information known to others. The Deputy will appreciate that. In fact, I think Irish people are very private about those types of things. Nobody wants to see a gagging clause being used to prevent important information reaching people who have an oversight duty or a role in the system like we do. If one sees a classic settlement, it can have very little information in it at all. It could even be as short as a page, saying here is an amount. The Deputy is absolutely right that non-disclosure agreements can be contained and kept private. However, some individuals want their business to be private, and that of course is to be respected. Our role, as a regulator, is to make sure we have effective oversight of the system.

We intend to have that and we will have it. We see the feedback loops as important bases for affording us an opportunity to see if there is extra, fresh or new information that we could take into account or to determine whether we should require the lenders to look at that and do the read-across, which we have told them we expect. That will not stand in our way when we are asking the relevant questions about the basis of settlements and so on. Much of that information is not contained in the relevant documents. It is not about the final piece of paper, it is about a line of sight on the litigation. We have a line of sight.