Mr. Gabriel Makhlouf:

I will cite two things in response to the Deputy's question. First, I do not agree that consumer protection is way down our list of priorities. Everything we do is ultimately about protecting consumers, and I have written about this on my blog recently. Our founding legislation referred to our focus being the promotion of "the welfare of the people as a whole" and I take that extremely seriously. Everything we do, whether monetary policy and monetary stability, financial stability, mortgage measures, rules for banks and the capital or buffers they need to sustain, or the moneylender rules that we recently amended, is ultimately about protecting the community's interests one way or another. It is about promoting the welfare of the people as a whole. I do not see the tensions that some people see in our role. I absolutely acknowledge that there are different systems operating in different countries.

In Ireland, it makes quite a lot of sense to bring together the regulation of the financial system and the protection of consumers. We spend a lot of our time supervising the financial service providers. These are the same people who provide services to consumers. As I said, separate entities exist in other countries but creating one here would dilute the potential of our mandate, which is to be a single entity looking at the whole of what is going on with a financial service provider. That is my view but I acknowledge there are different regimes around the world. I emphasise, however, that I do not agree that consumer protection is not at the top of our mind. Everything we do is about protecting consumers.