Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 27 May 2015

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis

Nexus Phase

Photo of Kieran O'DonnellKieran O'Donnell (Limerick City, Fine Gael)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

Can I just before you ... can I just put it in context? And, Chairman, I'd like to quote from Vol. 1, page 97, which is the Governor of the Central Bank at the time, John Hurley's, foreword to the financial stability report, and I quote, and he's speaking about, he says:

However, the Irish banks have negligible exposure [it's the third paragraph down] to the sub-prime sector, and they maintain relatively healthy by the standard measures of capital, profitability and [the] asset quality. This has been confirmed by the stress testing exercises we have carried with the banks.

So the two questions, I suppose, I want to ask there is that were those stress tests ... do you believe that they reflected the concerns, we'll say, that were being expressed at the regularity board level of which you were a member of at the time? Did it come up for discussion in terms of the stress test of the banks with the Financial Regulator at the time and that board, that they'd concerns about the loan portfolios of the banks, stress tests, liquidity, profitability?