The Director of Corporate Enforcement has told an Oireachtas committee that if the events that happened around the collapse of Anglo Irish Bank in December 2008 happened again today, his office would not be equipped to deal with it.
But Ian Drennan said there are very few organisations in the country that would be, because it was "off the scale" in terms of the massive lines of enquiry, which in turn resulted in "uplifting" of hundreds upon thousands if not millions of documents.
"In all fairness to those people who were there at the time I don't think they had any inkling at the outset as to what this would end up being in terms of the scale of it," he told the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Business, Enterprise and Innovation.
He added that while there was regrettably some serious failures, the people who were there at the time also deserve a lot of credit for the positive outcomes.
He said that the risks of such an investigation are enormous and in a repeat situation alot more thought would have to go into identifying those risks and mitigating them in an appropriate manner to ensure there wouldn't be a repetition of what happened with the previous investigation.
But Mr Drennan also said that his office has gone through a very significant recruitment programme since he took over its running, and a range of new skills have been brought to the organisation.
He also said the ODCE has an excellent working relationship with An Garda Siochana, with a number of gardai seconded to his office from the National Economic Crime Bureau.
Mr Drennan also told the committee that a lot of people were "very badly damaged" by the experience of the Anglo investigation.
He said there is a narrative in the public domain at the moment which is not complete.
"There are dots to be joined and there are bits missing," he said, "and if and when the full story ever comes out it does put quite a different complexion on it."
Mr Drennan said certain things were ventilated in court and certain things were not.
In relation to the trial judge in the Sean Fitzpatrick case's criticism of the way in which witness statements were taken from Anglo's auditing firm, Mr Drennan said taking a statement from an audit partner of a listed company is a very large undertaking, takes a very considerable amount of time and involves a significant number of people.
He added that audit firms like any professional services firms have to rightly have regard to their reputation and guard their reputations jealously.
He said they also have to guard their litigation risks very carefully and so it is not the same thing as someone giving a statement of what they saw.
"What subsequently ensued in terms of the way those statements came into being was to some extent a reflection of that and the complexity of that," he said.
The trial judge subsequently formed the view that all those concerned either completely lost site of what was happening was inappropriate or failed to recognise in the first instance that it was inappropriate, he added.
He said the document he had prepared would, if the committee gets to read it, explain these matters better.
Earlier Mr Drennan said that he fully acknowledges the seriousness of the investigative failures that occurred within the organisation that he leads during the course of its investigation into Anglo Irish Bank.
Ian Drennan also assured members of teh committee that valuable lessons had been learned by the Office of the Director of Corporate Enforcement (ODCE).
However, in his opening statement to the committee, Mr Drennan also said that when examining the issues that led to the collapse of the trial of former Anglo chairman, Sean Fitzpatrick, a number of issues of relevance must be considered, including the unprecedented scale of the five investigations his office was conducting into the bank at the time.
He said the risks associated with taking on a suite of investigations of this scale were not sufficiently appreciated at that time and as a result those risks were not appropriately mitigated.
Mr Drennan said the most fundamental error cited by trial judge John Aylmer, was the manner in which the ODCE went about taking witness statements from two Ernst & Young audit partners.
But he said between July 2010 and January 2012, approximately 60 statements were taken from other witnesses during the course of the investigation and none of those attracted any criticism from either Mr Fitzpatrick's defence team or the court.
The Director also claimed that the factors that contributed to the trial judge ultimately directing the jury to acquit Mr Fitzpatrick extended well beyond the failures that occurred within the ODCE.
He added that an enormous level of high quality investigative work was done over the period in question, and that was an achievement that came at a considerable human cost.
Sean Fitzpatrick was acquitted on all charges against him at the Circuit Criminal Court in May 2017 after the trial judge directed the jury to find him not guilty as a result of serious concerns about the manner in which the investigation was handled by the ODCE.
These included the shredding of files during the first trial and the coaching of key witnesses during the investigation.
Mr Fitzpatrick had faced 27 charges of misleading the bank's auditors and furnishing false information about multi-million euro loans to him and people connected to him between 2002 and 2007.
Mr Drennan reminded the committee that he had offered to give it a detailed submission around the collapse of the trial in 2017.
However, he said that on two separate occasions subsequently, the committee had told the ODCE that it would not accept such a submission.
He said that while he respects that decision, the net effect is that the committee does not have the necessary information to enable it to reach evidence and fact-based conclusions.
Mary Butler, the chairperson of the committee, later told Mr Drennan that the committee had now decided in private session earlier today to accept that report and the clerk would be in touch with the ODCE to arrange getting it.
Mr Drennan also pointed out that the Anglo Irish Bank probe was actually comprised of five separate investigations and it resulted in four other criminal trials, all of which saw people being convicted.
He said it was important to note that it was never suggested in any court that any of these four investigations were in any way deficient or below the requisite standard.
Defending the ODCE's wider work, Mr Drennan that said that over the past decade it has secured 97 District Court convictions and convictions on indictment have been recorded on 46 counts in the Circuit Court.
The Director also said that the ODCE has overseen the restriction of 1,648 directors of insolvent companies and the disqualification of a further 228 company directors.
He also said that over the past decade, ODCE interventions had resulted in unlawful loans to company directors worth half a billion euro being rectified.
He added that further instances of non-compliance have also been addressed through cost effective approaches including the issuing of warnings and statutory directions.
A number of guidance documents have been produced by his office, Mr Drennan said, to help people engaging with companies in a range of capacities.
Mr Drennan was before the committee as it scrutinises the general scheme of the Companies (Corporate Enforcement Authority) Bill 2018 which aims to give new powers to the ODCE.
