Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I would not characterise it in terms of punishment at all. What we are discussing here, and what the Deputy is questioning me on, is how much capital the banks are required to hold and why. As I said, they do hold a higher level of capital than their European peers. In fairness, to describe that as punishment, if that is what the Deputy is doing, is not a term I would use. While I do accept that the level of capital that they are holding does have other consequences, we have also just gone through an extraordinary economic shock and our banks and financial sector did have the resilience to withstand that shock due to the level of capital they held combined with the employment wage subsidy schemes that we put in place. While I think there is a debate ongoing regarding the level of capital that our banks hold, I believe we saw the value of higher level of capital at a time in which we shut down our domestic economy at so many different points and it did not travel into a big difficulty in our banking sector.