Mr. Patrick Neary:

-----for six. What happened was when we went up with the 77 to the budget and remuneration committee, I mean, they were kind of quite taken aback, I suppose, because, you know, this was a huge figure. It seemed to be inconsistent with our ... the strategy ... that process that we had gone through not too long before ... so, where had the figure come from? And there was a lot of argument and discussion.

It was a combination of new work that we had got and also vacancies and pressure on existing staff. The long and short ... the long and short of it was that ... yes, sorry ... I'm sorry, I don't mean to use up your time. The long and short of it was that the authority approved 25 staff, right, and they gave me some discretion about how that staff should be allocated. Now, I think an extremely important fact in all of this is that the Central Bank ... the HR department of the Central Bank recruited all our staff for us and, to be fair to them, they used recruiting agencies, they put ads in the paper, they had stuff up on the web, we could not get people to come to work in the Central Bank. So much so, that every month during 2008, we had the deputy director general of the Central Bank who was responsible for providing recruitment services, coming and briefing the authority on his efforts.