Professor Philip Lane:

My view on this comes out of the Honohan report. It does seem as if individual banks had incomplete information. At least some of the decisions they were making were on the basis of not having the full picture of the debts of individual borrowers, and we have seen that in some cases. It is important that the credit register is in place before the credit situation normalises. When there was very little lending for the past six years perhaps it was not the first order of business but as the banking system normalises, having that in place will be important.