Even if it comes too late to avoid what happened in Ireland, the lessons of the Irish case will have helped protect other European countries in the next wave of crises, however far in the future they may be. Pitfalls: complex decision-making Let me be more brief on the pitfalls.
One is clearly the challenge of delivering a streamlined, decisive and quick-acting institutional machine, against the background of (i) a legal underpinning (in the Treaty) which means that decision-making structures are being grafted onto a governance structure designed for monetary policy decision-making and not at all for banking supervision; (ii) the need to delegate much of the work, but at the same time maintain close lines of communication and authority between the central supervisory entity and the national supervisors (remembering that by far the largest fraction of supervisory resources will remain in the national agencies for the foreseeable future and (iii) the need to take regulatory actions from the centre which may in some cases require the use of national structures for implementation and enforcement.