Mr. John Moran:

The first one is quite easy, actually, because I had the great advantage of not knowing how anything worked. So, I was likely to do things differently. Not because I didn't want to do it any differently but I didn't realise that it should be done in a particular way.

The .. I had the advantage as well of having colleagues in the Civil Service who knew how things should work and were, I think ... hopefully I will look back and see that I didn't make a mistake anywhere along the way because they were protecting me and making sure that we weren't doing anything that ... that was wrong. And ... and I think that, sort of, in a way that ... that the answer is in there, right? We moved, while I was in the Department, to a situation where we brought the NTMA team into the Department specifically so we had the ... the corporate finance guys from the NTMA physically in an open-plan area in the Department. We integrated the ... the people that were going to stay with the Department as civil servants into that room. They worked together. And so, I think, you found that there was a bit of fear at the beginning as to what does this all mean and is this a change ... but that by integrating the two teams, I think, we actually got a lot of buy-in.

I think that the other thing that I would say in terms of going into the system first - and, again, I have been saying this for some time, right - it was grossly under-resourced. That's the first dramatic, sort of, impact that you probably had when you ... when you walked into the... into the system. And at the Central Bank at the time, it was already changing. But at the Department of Finance, it had most certainly not at that time. And that's on all fronts. I mean, that's just the ... the support for doing your job, the ... the fact that there wasn't a ... what I call a corporate centre. So that a lot of time was being spent ... a lot of the, actually we talked about it earlier, the technical expertise was being spent doing relatively administrative type tasks and then repeating them because actually nobody knew that they had been done somewhere else. And so ... so the structure needed to change in the ... in that respect.

You know, I think inevitably when you come in to a situation and you find that there are, sort of, different ways of looking at it you can see it differently. What I can say is I don't ever recall a situation where anybody said, you know, "We don't, sort of, welcome you into the system." But I would comment on one or two things which are, sort of, perhaps not even surprising and they weren't done in any ... any sort of bad faith, but people used to refer to the fact that they were ... had recently joined the Department, they were there less than three years, right? I don't think in many other organisations - if you have actually lasted three years, you've probably done quite well, right - you would still consider yourself not part of the system, right. But that was as much the people coming in perhaps, as the people being there. What ... what we did find was that there was a growing integration of the system. But what worries me is, what I said earlier, which is if you go in, you find that you are doing all this fantastic work but is there enough support to be able to do it, for people to actually stay? And I don't think we should, sort of, assume that transiency in terms of staff means that they are not welcome. It may just mean that they realise that there are better places, potentially, in terms of support to work.