During a meeting of the Joint Oireachtas Commitee on Finance and the Public Services which discussed the Commission of Investigation into the Banking Crisis with the Minister of Finance, I said: It is very interesting that at present, the Dodd-Frank Bill is going through the United States Senate. It is aimed at achieving almost the same outcomes...

One of the outcomes it is trying to achieve is to deal with the belief that investors have that banks can be too big to fail. There is a danger that this “too big to fail”, TBTF, belief might happen here if we do not set an objective for ourselves that this inquiry looks into what happened in the past to ensure the same thing does not happen again.

A big objective should be to ensure that future investors or creditors do not have the assumption that banking in Ireland is too big to fail and that we will bail out other banks.

I would like to see an objective to look not only at the past but also at the future.

To read a record of the full debate, please click here.