Dr. Elaine Byrne:

If we had such a register of debt, in theory we would have known in the 1970s and 1980s the extent of the then Taoiseach, Charles Haughey's debts to AIB and so forth. The idea is that one is not just influenced by what shares one may own. A register of liabilities is what assets one has and what shares one has, as the members all know from doing these forms every year, but it also lists what one's financial vulnerabilities are. Maybe there is a conflict because one owes a lot of money to a particular bank or institution. In Canada when I looked at it, in the case of its Minister of Finance, if one goes online, one will see the loans he has. Not the exact amount of loans, but the loans that he has and his exposure to different banks. It is a very open and transparent system.