Ms Marion Kelly:

At present, the staff are primarily secondees from the different banks. We have one permanent employee who joined us over three weeks ago and we are moving to recruit the rest of the staff in the next month. The Deputy will appreciate that we needed to get the company incorporated etc., before we could hire full-time employees but that is the intention.

We are fully funded by the five founding member banks. The contribution is in proportion to their relative size. Our establishment has been fully funded by all five banks. The establishment costs were of the order of €1.6 million. That was primarily to fund the consultation processes we entered into and to operate an office. We are fine-tuning the budget for the period going forward because that will be driven by the activities in our work programme.