Sean Barrett (Independent) | Oireachtas source

Thank you, Chairman, and welcome, Mr. Ahern. On page 55 of the core documents, Vol. 5, I am sure you recognise the quote anyway ... should you have sought out Morgan Kelly to discuss this analysis and you say:

I wish I had, I wish I had run into him at a match somewhere. ... I do acknowledge Morgan Kelly got it right more than [the] others.

Could I contrast that with a few pages earlier, on page 52, where you say:

I wasn't responsible for the Central Bank or ... the Financial Regulator. They're independent under the 1941 Act. I wasn't privy to what was going on in the boardrooms of the banks. There were plenty of very important people there. No bank director ever came to me to say that there were problems.

Didn't you need a Morgan Kelly to tell you that there were problems, the loan-to-value, the loan-to-deposits, credit growing at 20% or 30% a year when Germany was 4% in the same currency area, that you did need that kind of advice and you should have, as Taoiseach, taken on all the people there and said, "We cannot allow you to run this country over a precipice"?