John Paul Phelan (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I've a few questions. I'll try not to be repetitive, some of them may have been asked already but, firstly, I just ... you wore many hats, I suppose, in your time as Secretary General to the Government and Secretary General to the Department of Taoiseach ... I should say Secretary to the Government and - it's been referred to earlier on - your chairmanship of the NESC and also your role in regard to social partnership. And, therefore, you could be said, I suppose, to have been in a particularly strong position to observe the interconnectedness between different public bodies that led ... or that existed prior to the banking crisis. Against that background, what, if any, follow-up analysis was done internally within the Department of the Taoiseach or, indeed, the NESC on contrarian views on the soft landing theory? We've had different evidence from many witnesses going back to the start of the inquiry, a lot of it outlining that the soft landing rarely if ever materialised in other jurisdictions but there was a belief in this country that it was going to be ... we were going to be a different case, among certain people. Has there ever been any analysis along the lines I'm asking conducted?