Mr. Dermot McCarthy:

But in terms of lobbying, I mean, at a ... in one sense, lobbying is the essence of public life - engaging and seeking to influence others. I ... my view is that it's healthy to have that as transparent as possible and that the merits of what people are being asked to take on board can be assessed. I don't believe that Government was too vulnerable to lobbying effort. I did believe and do believe that lobbying capacity is not equally distributed around society and one of the strengths of social partnership was that it gave everyone a seat at the lobby table and they had to listen to each other. There are other ways of doing social dialogue, clearly, but all of that is supported, in my view, by a good regime and a realistic regime for monitoring lobbying activity.