Mr. Charlie McCreevy:

Well you see ... well ... well I'm not ... I'm only commenting on it because ... I, for completeness, I was asked in my ... direction as to influence of outside bodies from Europe etc. etc. And I thought I should mention it because there are people that have this view. You'd have to ask the IASB, but you must remember, this whole accounting standards thing is not something that was ever run by a government. No government came along to ... like in the 1960s, '70s, '80s, '90s to say, "We want independent accounting standards." This body came ... was a body that came about itself from the accountancy bodies from day 1 ... that they say, "Look, worldwide we should have the same accounting standards."

But what gave it great momentum was, in Europe, was the EU decided that we will recognise this, the independence of this body, and we will put this into effect by issuing a directive and regulation and that's what gave them their strength. They didn't come along to us in Europe and say, "You have to do this."

Now by the way, the United States had signed up to do this as well, but until the time that I left office in Brussels, they hadn't actually put all of it into effect. So they were, it's not ... to be fair to this body, this IASB, it's not ... it was never a government that said "We'll have an independent accounting standards body." This body grew up itself from, there was a, quite a famous individual in the '60s who had this idea for years and he kept pushing it and pushing it, and ... it is a very, very good idea that there would be one international set of accounting standards. But ... therefore it's an idea that came from the professions and the accountancy bodies, it's not an idea that came from any government.