Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 17 June 2015

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis

Nexus Phase

Mr. Tom Considine:

My experience of regulation down through the years, and I have been working in it for an awful long time, is that the more fault lines you open up - and, by fault lines, I mean where different institutions have to come together, they have to rely on each other and so on - the greater the risk that you're going to end up with things falling between the cracks and one saying, "No, that's not my issue, it's your issue", and so on. And one of the key things when a crisis comes around really is that you need to have all the people moving quickly, very quickly. And also I had experience. Prior to that, there was an awful lot of trouble because the Central Bank, because of ... you're familiar here with 33AK. Well, there was a version of that before 33AK came in and it made it very difficult for the Central Bank to pass information about, say, a wrongdoing that came into its possession, say, to the consumer director at the time, who was ... it was separate, right. So what I wanted to do really was to keep them under control of the same board so that we could get rid of these issues and you couldn't have people coming up and saying, "Well, I knew about that but because of the law, I could not do anything about it." And that's why I was-----