Mairead Farrell (Galway West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

That would be great. I had heard that the figure was one third, so the ECB has, essentially, monetised that debt.

Following on from that, many have pointed out that a clean distinction between monetary and fiscal policy was one of the first casualties of the global financial crisis of 2008. In the current crisis, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish where one policy ends and the other begins, which is only natural given where we are today. This interplay of monetary and fiscal policy has brought a co-ordinated crisis response, one of mutual benefit. The ECB backstop - the bond markets of member states - is allowing them to engage in countercyclical spending and I very much welcome that.

Closer to home, however, there is a crisis in our highly domestic banking sector, which Mario Draghi described as a "quasi-monopoly", and the concentration of the banks' internal risk-weighted models means we have the highest mortgage rates in the EU. A further crisis is that if Ulster Bank's deposit book is distributed among the other banks, they could move to impose negative rates on retail customers. Moreover, there is the possibility that the Government, through its significant shareholdings, could urge the banks to offset potential negative rates by accessing funding through, perhaps, the ECB's targeted longer-term refinancing operations, TLTRO, which offers the bank funding at negative rates and is unofficially seen as a way to mitigate negative interest rates for banks.

Given that a future of banking in Ireland commission could be in train and considering everything I have mentioned, the case for the Central Bank playing an active role in the commission seems fairly indisputable. What are Dr. Cassidy's thoughts on that? Does he agree?