Professor Terrence McDonough:

I would not want to define democracy as political interference. I think that if we were to democratise economic decision-making at that level, that is at the high level of central banking, we would need to reform our democratic institutions all the way down to make sure that what we were seeing was the expression of popular will rather than the interference by politicians or vested interests. That said, I think that the performance of the Central Bank in the absence of political supervision has been extraordinarily poor. There has just been quantitative easing in Ireland seven years after it was first engaged in rather successfully by the Federal Reserve Bank in the United States.