About

The Central Bank of Ireland is the country’s financial services regulator, and is part of the European System of Central Banks. Eadaoin Rock, general counsel, leads a team of 28 lawyers and four non-lawyers who all play a key role supporting the operations of the Central Bank. Under Rock’s leadership, the legal division has made important structural changes by creating three distinctive teams; the financial regulation team, the central banking team and the operations team. Each unit is led by a senior lawyer who has the task of enhancing the powers the institution has in order to carry out its governance of Irish financial institutions. In the past couple years, the financial crisis has resulted in a significant amount of additional legal work for the team, including increased litigation due to court actions the Central Bank took against individual companies impacted by the crisis, alongside increased legislative work arising from the domestic and European legislation, which occurred after the crisis hit. Despite these economic and legal challenges the team has managed to provide support on a number of large projects, including the development of new premises for the bank in North Wall Quay, the acquisition of Block R, Spencer Dock and the proposed Central Credit Register. In order to impact the strategic direction Rock’s team has involvement in key initiatives for the company, such as drafting regulation and working with the Department of Finance on the Supervision and Enforcement Act (2013), which significantly enhanced the tools available to the Central Bank and providing it with new powers to make regulation for the financial sector. Additionally, the legal division provided assistance on the transposition of a number of key directives; in particular Solvency II, the bank recovery and resolution directive and the deposit guarantee scheme directive. Providing more evidence of their specialised nature, the bank’s Regulatory Decisions Unit is currently supporting the first administrative sanctions procedure inquiries being taken under Part IIIC of the Central Bank Act 1942.