Mr. John Moran:

I mean while I ... I can speak from my experience, right, and I can speak from the experience of other people who actually did join the Department of Finance, whether it was even just as summer interns and whatever. The technical expertise and the technical experience that you get in this Department of Finance, and, indeed, in the Central Bank and others, is second to none, right? In terms of the difficulty of the questions that you're dealing with - we'll probably talk about some of them later, the questions that we faced in the bank restructurings - the burden-sharing, the rest of that, was second to anything I've ever experienced in any of the jobs I've had before. So there's no doubt in my mind that that is there, and people have a hunger for that. What I think shows that we also ... but things need to change. We also encouraged our economists, who in the past had been discouraged from doing that, to publish papers and put their names on them, so that the Department of Finance economists weren't at a disadvantage to economists at the earlier part of their career in other organisations because they may not have been getting any publicity for their good work, and allowing them to actually go and present their work, both to other agencies in the State and, indeed, to the broader public. That's what you need to do. And if you do that, guess what? The people that come in show just how good they are, and they get interested in the technical stuff. But there's also, and again I'm going to perhaps stray to areas that are important for you guys to understand, but also that you need to hear, the consumption of time that takes place in a Department of 300 people with the likes of parliamentary questions and the rest, that's what takes you away from the technical, right? I think we used to get something like 5,000 or 6,000 parliamentary questions. That's a lot of time for 300 people to actually go through that process. Now we can speed it up and we are putting in place an electronic system to allow that to happen, but you can't necessarily lay the blame on the people without understanding what are the demands and the competing demands because the one thing we know is the demand and the deadline for a parliamentary question is the first priority because you have to make it.