Mr. David McWilliams:

I am trying to get to the point of why this economy works as it does and why we need to have a set of views of the economy which reflect what actually happens in reality and not in some dream world of academia. I am saying the banks' balance sheets play tricks on them and they ultimately go bust. Why is that? Because they are allowed to borrow yet more. They keep borrowing and the balance sheets look fine. Then they realise the more they borrow, the worse the balance sheet is, but they don't see it.

Why did the interest rate not rise? Because we are in the EU. We have this crazy situation in that we have decided we are Germans. What is that all about? Ireland does most of its trade with Britain and the US, yet we have a currency attached to Germany. Somebody else may elucidate as to why that is. When German interest rates fall, our interest rates fall too. When our interest rates fall there is no warning sign from outside. That is hugely important because it is material to the next ten years, not just the last ten years.

We also have an issue with groupthink. Why did nobody, or very few, speak out? I believe groupthink is something that happens in many aspects. I believe that if you have ideas in Ireland which are beyond the mainstream, those ideas go through three phases. The first phase is open ridicule, the second phase is violent opposition and both of these happened to me. The third phase is where we are now which is that everybody pretends they were on your side all the time. This is what happens. Groupthink shifts because it is a conventional wisdom. We can talk about this during the questions.