Brian Cowen (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail)

First, on the question pertaining to Irish Nationwide and my term as Minister for Finance, I make clear to the Deputy that as I stated yesterday, the issue of legislation came up in respect of the Building Societies (Amendment) Act 2006. That Act pertained to providing an opportunity for building societies to remain mutual or to demutualise. There were meetings between the Irish Nationwide Building Society and the Department of Finance, one of which I can recall from memory attending myself as Minister in the normal way. It pertained to the progress that was being made in respect of the legislation and the input of the aforementioned building society would have been the same as that of others. I also met members of the Educational Building Society in the same way.

As I said yesterday, the question of whether a building society demutualised or not was ultimately a matter for its shareholders and members. The Deputy will recall that there were many small shareholders in Irish Nationwide Building Society at that time who were indicating that they were supportive of a possible demutualisation of the society, but that would be a policy decision for the society, not for me. Therefore, that would be the context in which those issues arose.

Regarding the question of supervision of financial institutions, the decision of this House back in 2003 was to set up an independent regulatory system, as the Deputy knows. That system has not served us sufficiently well, as we now know from all that has happened, but I was not responsible for supervising financial institutions. That was an issue for the independent Financial Regulator. To my knowledge, at no time did the regulator intimate to me that there were issues for legislative change or whatever that should have been considered by me in respect of that society or other financial institutions.

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