Professor Patrick Honohan:

Well, we have spent a lot of money on consultants ,including lawyers but also financial services firms. What do we use them for? Well, it, sort of, has evolved to ... And I would like to have the situation where we are only relying on consultants to be, if you like, body shops, where we want to do a big thing that involves a lot of people and we don't want the people all the time. To some extent, that's what we did in 2013 for the asset quality review. We engaged a lot of financial service firms to be doing this loan-by-loan assessment, but in the earlier years of the crisis we drew on advisers like Barclays Capital ... the Department of Finance had Rothschilds, which we had a problem ... Boston Consulting Group. They provided experts who were very broad in their experience and were able to being new ideas from left field at a time when we needed to consider lots of different issues. We have also used consultants to fill holes in our staff. For example, at the moment, for a particular reason in the enforcement area, we have felt the need to employ additional on one or two big projects which we weren't able to fill the staff locally.