Mr. David Begg:

Yes, well , you know, I've always had the very consistent view from an economic standpoint and that is that I think it's rather unfortunate that Ireland is so committed to the liberal market economy model. I would have much preferred to see Ireland move closer to a social market economy model on the Scandinavian basis. And that puts me in conflict with a lot of popular views here about taxation, for instance, right, and public services. I ... my view would be that you should have high quality, universally available public services in high growth ... or in a, sort of a, high productivity economy and that these can essentially ensure that. My thinking was influenced very much by a paper that was prepared by two economists at the Swedish LO in the mid-50s, Gösta Rehn and Rudolf Meidner, who came up with this distinct Nordic model, which has been extremely successful and has meant that the Nordic countries have been in the top ten from the point of view of economic efficiency, competitiveness, productivity and social cohesion. And my view is that that is really a much better place for Ireland to be, and you know, I would still try to do everything I could to shift opinion in that particular direction. Now that is not a common view in Ireland.