Mr. John Moran:

I may be comparing apples and oranges here because the 2008 numbers were probably for the joint Department, so you may actually have to take the number you had for 2008 and divide it by two. I mean, that's rough ... roughly saying ... because some people may have ... are likely to have gone to the Department of Public Expenditure and therefore if they had been doing the same thing as we'd be doing, they're there. But I will say one thing, right. I mean, it comes back to what I said earlier, on the earlier thing, we have to make it attractive to work in the Civil Service, right. It's one thing to say that we want to have all these, you know, highly qualified people, but unless it is actually attractive to work there, there are options and people will go to other places and it was, at numerous stages, a disappointment to me, having changed our own recruiting practices, where we would actually have said - to a certain extent against resistance from the system - that at levels of assistant principal or above, we were going to have open competitions, which meant that anybody could apply whether they were in the system or outside or whether they had just joined last week or whether they'd been there two years ago, could apply to become an assistant principal or above in the Department and we got very few people. I mean, I recall that during the time we tried to get a chief financial officer and chief operating officer into the Department of Finance, what amazed me was I didn't get one female applicant, in a profession which has a very significant female participations across Dublin in terms of professional firms, partners at accounting firms and the rest, and that was to take up the role as the chief financial officer of the Irish State.

And ... now there's something wrong in the system, I'm not saying ... blaming anyone ... but we also didn't also have a lot of male representatives who came in from outside. And so I think, you know, you have to look at these issues and you have to look at the qualifications and all the rest, but you have to look at it in a holistic way across the system, as to why is that.