Professor John FitzGerald:

No. I think the first discussion of what Morgan Kelly was producing was in September 2007. We were conscious of the fact there was a problem but made a call that Ireland probably would escape it. We were totally wrong. If we had known there would be a financial collapse elsewhere, then we would have known there was going to be one here. The way we operate when doing our forecasts is that we do not forecast for the rest of the world but take scenarios drawn up by the IMF, the National Institute of Economic and Social Research in London, the OECD or whatever and then plug them into the model. We plugged it in and as nobody expected a financial collapse, we therefore did not get one in Ireland. However, that is a cop-out. We should have seen the problem. As for Anglo Irish Bank, we may have discussed the problem at the quarterly editorial meeting in April of that year. One thing I learned is one does not say a bank is going to go bust or one will be sued for libel. However, that was not the reason. It was just that we concentrated on what we did well and did not open our eyes to a wider horizon. We then published in May but by June, it was clear that disaster was on the way.