Mr. Derek Moran:

Yes, I know Professor FitzGerald quite well and I think if you take, I'll come back to those comments ... if you take his overall ... he did say that the people that they dealt with on a regular basis that the interactions were very positive, that the Department made good technical contributions to it and we understood the relative roles and that would have been a lot of my dealings. And I mean, this is ... I mean, I got the sense in reading the extracts from his testimony that this centred around a couple of interactions that we had, I think, a combination of "Nervous Nellie" and - what was the other one? - and "Grumpy", and we are still looking for them within the Department. It's ... the Department's a big organisation. I don't know about the politicisation, I'm not sure that it's a fair comment, you know. I mean, certainly ... I know in the preparation of the 2006 medium-term review, there would have been a round-table meeting between the ESRI team doing it and the Department's team in terms of back and forth and iteration and an input into that. Some of the tension seemed to be over some commentary about the possibility that the capacity to increase corporation tax and on the front-loading of the capital programme. But certainly it wasn't my experience and I've always found that I had a very sort of healthy interaction ... but I mean they're Professor FitzGerald's views and I respect them.