Mr. Charlie McCreevy:

Well, what happened was that back since the mid-1960s there's been a move to have international accounting standards. It's a desire that is very well worthwhile, that we'd have the same principles for accounting worldwide. Americans use US GAAP, that's general accounting accepted principles. Irish and UK used to use Irish GAAP. And there always has been a move since the '60s to try and have an internationally accepted standard the way we look at accounts, whether it be in Australia, America, Ireland, whatever, you'd be interpreting the same thing. The IASB, the International Accounting Standards Board, was set up in the '60s and it's funded from a variety of independent sources. They started to produce then IAS standards over the years. The European Commission decided in 2002 that they would endorse IFRS the new standards - International Financial Reporting Standards. And the European Commission, even though not a member of the IASB, which is totally independent, adopted all these particular standards, and public companies had to apply these IFRS standards as and from, I think the accounts starting January 2007.

Those particular standards, some people ... those particular standards generally use mark-to-market. They all said there were some difficulties over standards, IAS2 and 39. And all these difficulties, some people would say, is that ... contributed somewhat to the financial crisis internationally but Ireland ... Ireland was ... Ireland was the one country, the same as all the other member states, bar one, who had ... who implemented exactly what the new regulation was. So the accounting professionals have been before the ... before the committee here, but they were doing their accounts on the basis of IFRS and there are certainly some anomalies in the IFRS standards which may have contributed globally to some of the financial problems and particularly in the EU. But that's a matter you can discuss with some accountants rather than me.