Mr. John Moran:

Yea, well I, first of all, I described it earlier and I am really serious about this, as a huge honour to have been able to do what I was asked to do for the last couple of years. But it really did strike me, both at the Central Bank when I joined the Central Bank and again at the Department, that people that were involved in sorting out the crisis, some of whom had been there through the process and were working through that, some of whom were new, were at a stage where they wouldn't even say to a taxi driver that was taking them home at midnight or even beyond that where they had been working, for fear of the recriminations that they would get. And I guess my point is that if our system has come to that and we're not defending that, we're not defending that kind of effort that these people are putting in to, to in fact make the system work. And clearly, this system has worked because we have seen one of the best recoveries in terms of a post-crisis recovery and so the system can deliver. We need a sort of, you know, now as no longer a member of that system, and I think you as public representatives need to be defending that system as well. I mean, clearly it's not perfect; no system is perfect. What I meant by the, sort of, the problem is, one cannot have creative thinking and that type of environment that you want to have for innovation, where people are afraid and so we have to look and see what it is that actually creates that culture, that atmosphere, so people can actually take a risk. The first question I was asked when I did a presentation to a series of assistant secretaries shortly after joining - it was ironic because it was by somebody at the back of the room, right, was, what was my attitude to people that made mistakes. We had developed a system of people who were afraid to make even the smallest of mistakes and that's not the type of environment or type of country I think we need and it's not the Civil Service and the public administration that we want. If people make mistakes and people always do make mistakes, we have to sort of, certainly not hide them - that would be a bad idea - but we have to find out what we can learn from that and move on.