www.ecb.europa.eu
Dublin, 23 October 2025
It is an honour to receive the Pádraig Ó hUiginn Award. Pádraig Ó hUiginn and the previous recipients of this award (John Bruton, Catherine Day and Michael Noonan) have all contributed to the development of Irish and European policy frameworks for the financial services sector.
A successful financial services sector requires the sound underpinning provided by high-quality public institutions and sustainable public finances. In particular, the financial services industry is characterised by distinct complementarities between the private sector and the public sector: commercial providers of financial services benefit from a public regulatory and supervisory framework that maintains prudential standards, protects consumers and underpins financial stability.[1]As the severe costs of the Irish banking crisis so painfully demonstrated, it is neither in our collective interest as a society nor in the interest of the financial services sector to be complacent…