Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party)
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I thank Professor Black for coming across the wide Atlantic to assist us with the banking inquiry. I had intended to ask him to give a short résumé of his experiences that have led him to be an expert on bad practices in the banks but he gave some of it in his introduction, which was quite interesting.

He referred to the prosecutions and the investigation into the savings and loan crisis. I remember it was a huge scandal in the United States back in the 1990s. It was a high profile case and was national news in the United States. With that success and what was shown, why was that not brought into legislation or regulation? Why, 17 years later in the United States and internationally, were the same bad practices allowed to create mayhem?