Professor Niamh Hardiman:

I do not know if any Irish banks deserved to be fined during that period. That is the first thing to say. The second thing to say is that knowing now what happened, it does seem there may well have been, at a minimum, questions to be asked. We were pushed back to asking about the vigour of the regulatory regime that was in practice. There were many reasons that Ireland wanted to adopt a light-touch regulatory regime. It was the norm in Britain as well and Irish expectations about what financial regulation would do were very much shaped by the fact that we really wanted to have an IFSC in Ireland. We wanted to encourage investment by traded financial services, and it has been very valuable to the Irish economy to have that. The real question is how light is light enough? Those are the sorts of questions the committee is concerned to investigate now.