Mr. John Moran:

Yes. We distributed the statement earlier. If members have questions on it, they may ask them if there is time.

Essentially, we are here to examine the accounts of 2012. However, the environment is fast moving and an awful lot has changed so, with the permission of the Chairman, I will probably touch on much of what has changed since the production of that set of accounts.

Everybody recalls that, in 2012, given the number of changes, we decided to revise our statement of strategy to refocus the Department across five goals which were not necessarily related only to a particular division. These were, essentially, the economy and jobs, the public finances, living standards of citizens, the exit from the troika programme and the banking sector. As these were the objectives when I took up my role, I felt I owed the committee the courtesy of announcing my resignation, which I announced to the Minister yesterday, so that it would be aware of that before this hearing, rather than doing it afterwards.

Because of the announcement yesterday, I have given a lot of thought to what I might actually highlight to the committee today among the many things that have happened in the Department. Of course, I could have spoken first about the performance in the accounts and the savings that we actually produced in delivering our outcomes. I could also have spoken about the stabilisation of the economy and the work we have done in the fiscal and banking sector. We made a somewhat brave statement in terms of resetting our objectives, which were agreed by the management team, and actually putting as our first objective the economy and jobs. We did that despite the fact that it was a task not just for our own Department, because a lot of actors have a role in this, and in view of the fact that at the time the Irish economy was losing 350 jobs a week. It was a particularly unusual task. The management team felt that what we had to do was to actually put that as the core of everything we did and, in effect, embark on a programme to see what we as a Department could contribute to what is one of the most troublesome issues in our economy at the moment. We tried to do so by, in some respects, enlarging the scope of what we had anticipated we would be doing in 2012 and to run that through into 2013 by conducting with the new economics team a micro-analysis of the economy. We did this by looking at different sectors and seeing what barriers existed, which, of course, informed our decisions around our budget, as well as through a relentless pursuit of solutions for banking and the financing of the economy, which I am sure we will talk about, and also a very public engagement with foreign and domestic investors and business communities around Ireland to try to rebuild confidence, which was essential to getting investment into the economy.

It is only appropriate that we should take some satisfaction from the fact that, in a relatively short period since the statement of strategy, we have moved from a situation of considerable job losses to one in which unemployment continues to drop every month, and has come from a peak of 15.1% down to 11.7%. Alongside that, the rate of interest paid by the NTMA to finance any of the activities of Government has dropped from a high of 14% to below 2.75% today. These are two key measures in terms of where we were going.

We distributed an annual review earlier, so rather than actually go through all of our specific performance against our goals, of which there are many, I thought it was more appropriate to simply distribute the document to members. I am happy to answer any questions on that. The review speaks for itself in terms of delivery over the course of the last year. However, I will take this opportunity to thank the staff in the Department and, equally, their families for their personal contributions and the single-minded dedication to these tasks that I saw over the last two years.

Something I have often heard is that people do not appreciate the size of the Department and the feat of delivery in view of this. There are just over 300 people in the Department, of whom 60 or 70 are engaged in very significant transaction-based material and work in Tullamore. That means we have produced these annual reviews using less than 1% of the Civil Service. In a sense, we have done that by dividing people into overlapping teams which have concentrated in the last year on different types of project. There are the business-as-usual projects that people more typically associate with the Department, and we have also had a separate group of people working towards a reform agenda to achieve a higher-performing Department. We have people looking at legacy issues from the crisis and we have had a team looking in particular at the Presidency of the Council of the European Union, which was, of course, a major priority for us during the course of last year.

Given that this is going to be my last appearance before the committee in my current role-----