The new regulators may be the best thing for political life in this country

I’d like to be a regulator when I grow up. Regulators are the new big thing. Regulators get to kick ass and take names.

Look crooked at a regulator and they'll revoke your license or fine you until your bottom line trembles. They're new, they're as clean as Eliott Ness and most of them are wisely refusing the temptation to become household names. They also breed like hamsters. A couple of years back, they were few and far between. Now, they're everywhere.

IFSRA, the Irish Financial Services Regulator, was celebrating its first birthday the day AIB's foreign exchange issue blew, and it must have thought all its birthdays had come together. What a gift: the chance to move into BankCentre and do the 'put your hands in the air and move away from that computer' stuff. IFSRA cut through all the bank's stated good intentions about paying back whatever it had gained by its software slip, and effectively said 'Yeah, well, how about you stick 25 million right now over in the Central Bank and we'll decide who gets what payout later.' With one bound, IFSRA was free from being merely a tedious obligatory mention at the end of bank advertisements. Admittedly, a few naysayers did whinge that IFSRA hadn't done anything until a whistleblower telephoned them and spilled the beans. Which is roughly the equivalent of saying Charlie Bird didn't do anything until the same whistleblower got through to him. The fact is that both, when they learned of what might euphemistically be called 'this operational discrepancy' took fast action.