Pat Rabbitte (Dublin South West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Well, I think it is very important. I would disagree with the Chairman if his question to Deputy Burton implies that he believes there would have been close contact between the leadership of an Opposition party and, say, the senior officials in the Department of Finance. That did not happen in my experience. Yes, I personally had interaction with senior officials in the Department of Finance after the crash but I mean, the system operates on the basis that the senior officials serve Government and they are very wary and overly secretive about the Opposition and I think as well that this democracy business was never intended for the same people to be in government for 14 years. When you look at it, it is not just the same party, it is almost the same people and I think that there is a danger in those circumstances, that there are some senior civil servants, if they don't become leveraged onto the side of what seems to be the permanent political Government, they at least are not as robust as they might be in advising Government that they have qualms about the direction of policy.