Mr. Charlie McCreevy:

So the answer was, we had taken in the period of time, we had decided that it was in the best interests of the Irish economy knowing that ... knowing the difficulties of the UK not joining. Plus the difficulties of that we were joining a currency union without ... without central budgetary and fiscal policy, because take the United States for example. Well if there was a big crisis in Minnesota, the Federal Government can make a decision to put resources in Minnesota. You don't have that with the euro, we don't have a central government to decide. So we knew all those downsides but we decided that it was in our best interests that we would join, knowing the downsides.

Now, one of the downsides was that we gave up control over our interest rate policies and that, that, if I was to make any ... if I was to ask one thing that the ... would have lessened the economic impact of the housing crash that Deputy Doherty referred to I would say ... I would say the loss of interest rate control was the biggest, because without any shadow of a doubt if we'd been there, if we had our own interest rate setting policy outside of the euro we'd have had higher interest rates.