Mr. Marco Buti:

I have seen the testimonies of a number of guests before me.

The current Governor of the Central Bank, Professor Philip Lane and others have indicated that the focus of supervision and the responsibilities carried out at the national level were incomplete at best. The focus was essentially on a bank-by-bank state of health. The State did not consider the stability of the financial sector as a whole. The supervisors were not paying sufficient attention to these matters and the fiscal policy at the time was also an issue. I am not talking so much about the fiscal stance in macro-economic terms but rather in terms of the composition of fiscal measures, including the type of tax measures which were taken, which helped to fuel the property boom at the time. In retrospect, there were failures on the supervisory front and in fiscal policy. Previous testimonies have been clear, and I agree, that especially when one enters an economic and monetary union in which monetary policy, interest rate and exchange rate tools are no longer available for national purposes, one has to be overly cautious and extremely attentive to fiscal policy and supervisory practices. At the time, in Ireland, but not only Ireland, there was not sufficient attention on these tools.