John McGuinness (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fianna Fail)
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We cannot go into it because it is policy but I must state the payment of that type of salary to people in the context of the public debate occurring on what is paid to those generally described as bankers is significant. The public and I wonder how it can be justified. In so far as policy is concerned, it is a matter for another committee, but I am expressing my point of view.

When the NTMA recruits staff, it obviously looks at what they were paid in the private sector in their previous employment. It considers their skills and compares them with the range of skills the agency requires. I fully appreciate the very positive work the agency does and that it can be difficult to recruit people with the necessary skills at a lower cost. However, the salary costs do not sit well in the public debate.

I want to link this subject to what Mr. Corrigan stated on the State Street issue. Mr. Corrigan used the words "collusion" and "fraud" and said people cannot be trusted. I do not wish to take him out of context but I believe these are the words he used. This territory is not dissimilar to the world of high finance. It has happened before and will certainly happen again.

However, in the context of what is being paid to people with a range of skill sets dealing with contracts like the one the National Treasury Management Agency, NTMA, had with State Street, I would have thought they would have been ahead of the curve with regard to how fraud and collusion can happen and would have built into the contract some oversight of the transactions to ensure what happened could have been caught much earlier or could have been prevented from happening although it is difficult to prevent collusion and fraud by the nature of the transaction itself. Notwithstanding this, however, I am surprised by the lack of control. While I heard Mr. Corrigan's explanation earlier, given the range of people his organisation employs one would have expected greater controls within that organisation that would have anticipated this or certainly would have had some sort of oversight and would have prevented this from happening or would have built such oversight into the contract, as I suggested earlier. I seek Mr. Corrigan's views in this regard.