Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 10 June 2015

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis

Nexus Phase

Ms Mary O'Dea:

Yes, thank you. I have looked back over those - the various initiatives that came in. To be honest, most of the issues that came to the board ... as I said, I was there at my statutory capacity as consumer director and I would have looked at them from ... through that lens. With the benefit of hindsight, they should have been brought in earlier. I think probably in a couple of cases the issue was over-complicated, so for example if I take the case of directors compliance statement, there was a similar provision being brought in in company law, and there was a lot of toing and froing as to whether or not the provision that the regulator was bringing in was cutting across that, or was not in line with that. And I think the issue was actually, now that I look back at it, made much more complicated than it needed to be. I think it was also impacted by the, the statutory role ... that had been built in in relation to the growth of financial services where the regulator didn't want to introduce something that was uncompetitive. So I think that also affected things, but as I look back at those, they should have been brought in earlier. And actually, I contrasted with later in 2009, when we took a different approach in relation to directors' loans and related party loans, were we knew their was a provision coming in under company law and, nevertheless, we moved ahead quickly and brought in the provision as the regulator. And that was more onerous than the one in company law, but we still felt that was appropriate.