Marc MacSharry (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

In the last part of his statement, which was very good, Mr. Regling mentioned, as did Senator Susan O'Keeffe, that Ireland was a country in which it seemed no one was really in charge to prevent such a bubble from emerging over the four to five years before the crash. In his research and interviews with 100 people, and no doubt from reading other reports and media commentary of the day, he will have noticed that, apart from the John Taylor he mentioned from Stanford - we had Morgan Kelly here, and a number of other commentators - by far the majority of academics and other commentators were predicting soft landings and so on. In his look at the Oireachtas, the Parliament, can Mr. Regling reflect for us on the discourse that was going on? Clearly, we know what Government was doing, but in terms of the Opposition, was the Government being held to account to the extent it ought to have been? Was the Opposition advocating counter-cyclical policies or promoting an even more pro-cyclical set of policies? Can Mr. Regling give us an insight into that?