Mr. Tom O'Malley:

Deputy Pearse Doherty's first question was about the special prosecutor. We certainly discussed the question of the allocation of prosecution functions when we were drawing up the report. In America, for example, they have the concept of the special prosecutor, usually however in a more political context, such as when a senior politician, including perhaps the President, is under investigation. When it comes to white-collar and corporate crime, generally speaking they would not necessarily have special prosecutors but they do have prosecutors who are specialised in the field. Let me give an example, a great deal of white-collar and corporate crime is prosecuted in the southern district of New York, because that is where many of the major financial districts are located and therefore, both the prosecutors and the judges who operate in that particular area have tremendous expertise in areas such as insider trading and areas that are very complicated and so forth.

One of the things we have to realise when considering translating that into this country, is that the real problem is not so much a question of prosecution; it is very often the question of investigation, in that the investigation of these offences takes time, as we saw with the banking cases, for example. The enormous amount of documentation that will be assembled as a result of those investigations could run to millions of pages of documents and will take time either way. Therefore what I would suggest - I think this is accepted fully by all the law enforcement agencies in this country - is that one needs specialisation in the field. I think under the Constitution it is possible to have a prosecutor other than the Director of Public Prosecutions and Article 30 of the Constitution would provide for that. Given the scale with which we are operating and given that the number of large-scale offences of this nature that must be prosecuted probably will be rather small - I hope I am not being too optimistic - I think it is far better to stay with the Director of Public Prosecutions because that office has an enormous amount of expertise right across the board. What experience has shown is that while it is all very well sometimes to talk about appointing special prosecutors, it is a very specialised area in itself and one does need experienced people. Therefore the better idea at present is to leave the prosecution of serious offences within the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions. There is a specialised section within that office to deal with this area but it may need further resources as time goes by in order to deal with more of those offences.

In respect of the Deputy's second question, the idea of rewarding people for being whistleblowers, is not one we had thought about in the course of our deliberations. It is obviously something, as members can appreciate, that must be treated with great care to ensure it does not give rise to other issues.

When one starts to give people big money for doing that kind of thing, the temptation to do wrong and to make false allegations and so on can be very strong. I am talking off the top of my head in a personal capacity and certainly am not speaking on behalf of the commission but were there to be some reward, I would not have any moral objection to it. I would, however, be anxious that the rewards would be kept modest and should not be at a level at which they would provide the temptation to engage in what might be false allegations.