Mr. Brian Cowen:

I think a lot of mistakes, I suppose, were made. I think that the biggest mistake we all made was failing to analyse as regularly - as Regling and Watson analysed it - when you're in a new currency situation, where interest ... you no longer have control over your interest rates, you've got to find other parts of the toolkit to make sure you don't end up where we ended up. In other words, your fiscal policy and your incomes policy has to be ... has to compensate for the fact that you ... when your economy is growing, when your economy is moving ahead at full-trend growth, you can't produce interest rates as a domestic policy instrument to calm down the economy, so you've got to find other ways of doing it in a monetary union. There's great benefits to being in a monetary union, but that's a lesson that we certainly have to learn.