Mr. William Beausang:

No, I wouldn't say that I had ever any experience of that. I mean, I think, in the Department ... I mean, because I had worked as an economist on the economic side in the late 90s, and, at that time, we were writing papers warning about the risk of a hard landing. So you could imagine that there was a, sort of, I think, a loss of credibility in the ability of the Department, and certainly ... and I can't say because I'm not part of the political system, but I mean, in a scenario where, at that point in the economic cycle, the Department is saying there's big risks here now, house prices are taking off, credit is taking off, the fact that then the economy rolls forward and performs very strongly and shows ... and demonstrates a capacity to grow, you know, into the early 2000s, you know, quite sustainably, at a rapid pace, you can imagine that there was a certain scepticism around the Department's ability to call the economy correctly, even maybe within the Department itself.

Maybe to elaborate on that a bit more, I mean, when I first joined the Department in 1990, there was a designated economic service, and part of that work would have looked at things like, you know, longer term or medium-term economic forecasts, but, as we moved towards EMU, and moved into EMU, that kind of resource, increasingly, was looking at meeting the, kind of, governance requirements around our membership of EMU, things like the Stability and Growth Pact, and the kind of fiscal forecasting that was involved in ... that was required in that context. So, I mean, you know, at a point in time in the Department, there was ... it was somebody's job to worry about the current account of the balance of payments, which would have reflected the flows of finance into the State. You know, by the time the new century came around, and with our membership of EMU, and the fact that the monetary policy division of the Department, that would have been very involved in looking at monetary factors in the run-up team, you know, the fact that that had been recast as what, essentially, was my area, the financial regulation area, meant that there was a significant diminution of expertise in the Department at that ... you know, like, at that time, and it's ability to maybe call issues. As you know, more generally, as you probably heard from other witnesses ... I mean, kind of, macroeconomic modelling or forecasting ... I mean, the financial sector was, kind of, ignored in that work in a lot of instances, and that there wasn't a realisation maybe more broadly amongst the economics profession of the importance of monetary factors in assessing, you know, the current economic state.