Mr. Justice John Hedigan:

The Chairman is articulating very well the anguish and distress caused to people by the conduct of banks during the years and that is occurring in respect of vulture funds. I hear what he is saying. I understand entirely that the Deputies are at the coalface and meeting their constituents to discuss their problems. As a judge, I did not have quite the same level of exposure, but, like some of my colleagues, I had people in tears in my court. When I could not do anything for them, I called them up to the bench to let them to tell me their whole story in order that they could see a human being had actually listened to them. That was the best I could do in some circumstances.

All I can say in response to the matters raised so well by the Chairman, with such obvious personal pain, is that we will do the best we can to try to improve the culture in the banking sector. That is our challenge. We dare to believe we can do something good and move things on. It is a global phenomenon.

We are not on our own but we are very close to the head of the posse because not too many other countries have set up anything like this.

At the beginning of August we were invited to Stanford Graduate Business School's principled leadership summit. That was the first international recognition of our existence as a board and it was at the highest possible level. We were the only organisation like that there. Present were some of the biggest banks in the world and some of the largest companies, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and so on. I took that also as a vote of their confidence that our board could do something. I can assure the committee we certainly are going to try our level best. That is why I said that if I am invited again I would be happy to come back here next year to answer any questions the committee may have and to outline our progress during the year, including some of the problems we may have encountered.