Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 10 June 2015

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis

Nexus Phase

Mr. Cyril Roux:

Well I ... yes, I think so. I mean reading the Honohan report I can't tell how things were. What I can say ... I will, sorry to ... to take this opportunity, but I must say that since a month ago, the Freedom of Information Act has been ... is now applicable to the Central Bank. So it's very good so, you know, people can look at every single of my credit card receipts and I have no objection to that. But we do have requests to see all the e-mails that are exchanged internally and I find this really problematic. Okay, so there are exemptions in the Act, you know, so we have to go though every single e-mail to see whether that falls under the exemption or whether it's commercially sensitive or, you know, which reveal ... but the fact that any time I write an e-mail or someone writes an e-mail to me they have to think whether it will ... it has the potential of being published. And I'm not talking about e-mails that I wrote long ago; we have requests for e-mails that I wrote last ... you know, yesterday or up to the date of the submission and it's very detrimental to the way we function. So we are writing less and it is very problematic. We are also in meetings all the time. I am away in Frankfurt, in ... in London, the Governor is away. My staff are all over the place and it's problematic now, really.