Professor John FitzGerald:

In January or February 2009, I said that the problem in the Department of Finance was that it had a number of very bright economists, but too few people working on economics. It was brought to my attention that there were a very large number of people with economics qualifications in the Department of Finance at the time but that was not the problem. I have worked in the Department of Finance and it is one thing having a qualification and another being a practising economist. It is a culture where you talk together, you disagree, and that was the kind of culture I had grown up in. I learned much of my economics in the Department of Finance but the numbers working in the area were very small. I suppose it was symptomatic of the culture - one of the reasons I left the Department of Finance in 1984 was that I was told if I wanted to be promoted I had to stop being an economist and go and do something different. I wanted to be an economist, so I left.

The HERMES model of the Irish economy was developed as part of an EU contract originally in the late 1980s, which my colleague John Bradley won. The results were published in a book by North-Holland - one of the best academic publishers - edited by the European Commission in 1993. Two of the authors were Department of Finance officials so they participated in this area. They continued to use it, but then the Department cut back the resources in that area and by the end of the decade was relying totally on the ESRI to do that kind of work for it, so that the Department put a much lower priority on work on economics. Certainly in the last decade I felt there were some really good people but too few of them and I think it showed.