Mr. John Moran:

There is a difference between decision making and policy advice, right. So I think that's an important distinction that was made earlier, I think, and I would repeat that, right. What I made reference to there is at the time that we were going through the troika process, and I didn't know the system before so I think there are some very interesting questions for you in this context because, first of all, you had a Department where all the spending decisions, all the knowledge about the various Departments and what they do and the different sectors was also with the macro and that got split. What the troika process did was it in a way brought some of that back together again.

It picked out the large structural issues that needed to be addressed - take the legal services Bill, some of those issues around mortgage arrears - and it put those in a context of meetings that were happening every quarter to actually look at where we were, take stock of where we were, what were we going to do over the next quarter, and the system knew what it needed to do and delivered. The question is that when you have both split the Department of Finance into two different Departments and you have also not got that sort of quarterly process of coming together in the same formal way, and as you know what happened at the troika ... it's not so much special to the troika, but the process was that, for a period of a week and a half, there were interviews with external people, both domestic and international. There were people who came in from outside knowing our system and we all sat down and took stock of what was actually the state of play with the Irish and, indeed, the European and world economies and what did we need to do for the next period and we set it out. And therefore that is missing, I think, in the ... I don't know, Derek will know more what they're actually doing.