period, thereby considerably reducing risks for the domestic banks. during this time, the central bank of ireland has worked with the ecb to ensure that the necessary liquidity has been made available to allow the irish banking sector to continue to function. returning to the banking strategy, in practice, it has come to be organised around three objectives – recapitalise, resize and restructure. the first move to recapitalise banks was in late 2008, though these injections were small relative to what would come later. to help stabilise and start to resize the system, it was decided to establish a national asset management agency ( nama ) to purchase the largest property development - related loans, removing them from banks ’ balance sheets. by removing the uncertainty about future losses on these loans, the intention was that it would leave banks in a stronger position to recover. the nama approach, with a view to breaking even over time, was to buy loans at marketrelated prices from banks. given the state of the property market, this implied substantial haircuts and necessarily entailed crystallising sizeable losses on banks ’ balance sheets. this generated a large and transparent recapitalisation need, which was met by the state. while it was recognised that this would be costly, it gave visibility to the process. however, there were difficulties. as a result of a requirement to apply competition law, it was necessary to value and transfer loans individually. this made the transfer process a relatively lengthy one, which worked against the objective of moving quickly to cleanse balance sheets. more significantly, an unforeseen consequence was the fact that the average size of the haircut increased over time, as the typical size of haircut on the later tranches proved unexpectedly large. as a result, the final recapitalisation need arising from the nama process was greater than the initial indications from the earlier tranches of loan transfers had suggested. this added to the uncertainty as to the ultimate cost of state support for the banks and, given that this news emerged as the european sovereign debt crisis itself was unfolding, it added to pressures on the irish sovereign at a crucial time in 2010. taking everything into account, the total recapitalisation need up to end - 2010 was slightly over €46bn, of which just under €36bn ( over one - fifth of 2010 gdp ) was gross debt enhancing. the bulk of this €36bn was accounted for by

sharon donnery : the importance of data - statistics during the pandemic and beyond opening remarks by ms sharon donnery, deputy governor of the central bank of ireland, at the central bank of ireland webinar " the importance of data : statistics during the pandemic and beyond ", 7 october 2021. * * * i would like to welcome everyone this afternoon to our conference on the important role of statistics in economic analysis and policymaking, and what lessons we can take from the pandemic period to support us in our future challenges. evidence - based policymaking is key for the central bank and, of course, high quality data provides the foundation for this approach. in addition, part of our statutory role involves producing high quality financial statistics, both for our own analysis but also as a public good. we disseminate our data and analysis through various publications, seminars and through ongoing interactions with government departments, academia and commentators. it is highly important to us to be a trusted and credible source for our users domestically and further afield. improvements to statistics in recent years one of my very last pre - pandemic speeches was at the sixth household finance and consumption conference in december 2019. 1 my focus then was very much on marking the significant progress made by the statistical community over the previous decade in response to the financial crisis. we saw substantial national and international efforts to build better quality, more comprehensive, flexible and integrated statistics. international cooperation is crucial for further progress including identifying data gaps, building areas of speciality and developing platforms to share ideas in a world that is becoming ever more interconnected. within the central bank we have being developing key skills to integrate granular data into our decision making and existing risk assessment frameworks. local initiatives covering credit risk and borrower resilience such as the central credit register and european initiatives such as anacredit along with insights on capital market financing from securities statistics have emerged as important tools in supporting decision making within the central bank. our data and analyses also support decisions and public policy on a range of topics impacting households and businesses, most notably with the establishment of irish national claims information database in 2019, as well as ongoing data sharing with the central statistics office for the purposes of national accounts, amongst other things. to future - proof our data as the economy and financial sector evolves, we were also feeding into work on establishing harmonised statistics on distributional financial accounts, occupational pensions and the innovations in payments at the european level, amongst others