There was effectively no balance sheet available to give an overview of the Irish domestic banking sector as late as 2010, the former secretary general of the Department of Finance has said.
John Moran, who left the department earlier this year after just two years in the role, said he had been asked by Central Bank governor Patrick Honohan to examine the sector at that time.
Mr Moran returned to Ireland in 2010 to head up wholesale banking supervision at the Central Bank. In March 2011 he was seconded to the Department of Finance, where he was second secretary in charge of banking before becoming secretary general in March 2012.
Speaking on RTÉ Radio 1's The Business programme, Mr Moran recalled that when the bailout negotiations happened at the end of 2010, he had been asked by Mr Honohan and Central Bank head of regulation Matthew Elderfield to examine the domestic banking sector.
He said this time of “difficult decisions” was probably the moment he asked himself: “What have I done?”
“Having run a multinational organisation, I asked for effectively a balance sheet of the Irish banking sector in late 2010 and it didn’t exist,” he said.
“So we still really had never had the ability even at that late stage to sort of just add up all the pieces and say ‘this is what we are dealing with’.”
Asked whether people would not find this “gobsmacking” when the banks had long since been guaranteed, Mr Moran said everyone understood “how limited” the operating systems were in many of the banks.
“There was a limited amount of automatic reporting, so people were sending in balance sheets.”
AIB reported on one day at the end of a month and Bank of Ireland reported on another and "the two didn't match".
“To the extent that they had transactions between each other, they would be different.”
“It’s those simple, practical little issues that were making it very difficult to actually make the decisions that you needed to make.”
Mr Moran said he thought people “would like to have found a solution” to the banking crisis overnight.
“I think they underestimated just how little had been put into the resources in terms of operating systems both in the banks and across the whole system.
“Until you get those fixed, you don’t have the information you need to deal with.
“That, of course, has run through everything we’ve been doing since, whether it’s trying to get on top of the mortgage arrears situation, the lending to SMEs. There wasn’t a magic wand that you could wave in respect of that.”
When Mr Moran resigned in May, Minister for Finance Michael Noonan said he had accepted his resignation with "great regret" as he had played a "leading role in recapitalising the banking sector and restoring the economy at a very difficult time".
“I valued his counsel during those very difficult times,” Mr Noonan added.
A lawyer by training and a former investment banker by trade, Mr Moran is credited for his deal-making skills.
In his time at the department he oversaw the purchase of a stake in Bank of Ireland by a group of international investors, the liquidation of Irish Bank Resolution Corporation, the sale of Irish Life to Canada's Great-West Lifeco and Ireland's exit from the EU-IMF bailout.
