Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 15 July 2015

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis

Nexus Phase

Mr. Pat Farrell:

Again I think I defer to the experts, but I think in their evidence here, none of them, I think, concluded that. I mean, there was lots of evidence ... there's a debate about how much power the Financial Regulator had, and the Financial Regulator - and again I think it speaks to the evidence that's been here before - had quite a range of powers which were never utilised. It had sectoral concentration limits which were, in their own words, "in abeyance"; it had the ability to raise capital limits for certain types of lending; it had the ability to rely on a compliance statement under company law, which was never actually called in; it had the ability to apply sanctions to the administrative sanctions regime for prudential matters, but it only ever applied them in the case of consumer. So, I don't know what that speaks to, but I do know that, as I said, there were powers there but, as to ... what was the context for their application, non-application, I am not sure. I don't believe it was because of the fact that there was a financial services centre here. I mean, London has a major financial services centre; other centres, Luxembourg, they had issues during the crisis. It didn't lead to the kind of level of crisis that we experienced in this country.