Professor Niamh Hardiman:

I did not pin that particular phrase on to any particular episode. What I want to highlight is that there are two dimensions to governing in a democratic political system. One is the exercise of power and responsibility. Governments must be able to exercise discretion, manage the economy, respond all the time to all the hard challenges that come their way and look for advice. The other dimension is legitimation and accountability. We know the Eurobarometer report suggests that Irish people have unusually low levels of confidence in our public institutions at the moment. They have been in decline for a number of years, which is very worrying because people are seeing that the levels of accountability have been weak and the mechanisms for getting that accountability have been weak. Inquiries such as this are the kind of thing I am talking about - the capacity to find out things that went wrong.

We also want these sort of processes on an ongoing basis. To come back to the points I made at the outset about parliamentary committees in other systems, it relates to this vigorous debate about ongoing policy and policy proposals and asking hard questions of the Government. It is very hard to ask hard questions of the Government in our system. A couple of times, Opposition questioners have been told that they did not ask the right question so they could not get the answers they were looking for. It relates to control of information by the Executive and the difficulties the Parliament has in gaining access. By "Parliament", I mean both the governing party backbenchers and the Opposition parties, not just on party lines.