Ms Mary Harney:

Well, in relation to the banks, you'd have to start, as I said earlier, with the banks themselves and so on, and those that audited and accounted ... did the accounting of the banks. But I think I said in my opening comments, when we entered the euro, with the huge availability of cheap money, we put a lot of effort into the whole conversion process, you know, what would we ... what rate would we go in at, how would we be affected vis-à-vis the UK - we were very concerned about the competitiveness issues there and the likely impact on inflation. I think, and this is with the benefit of hindsight, I think, if we'd put a process in place to look at the threats and the opportunities and the risks, we might have been able to take mitigating factors. Could we, for example, have decided to limit the amount of credit going into construction, or to any particular borrowers? Could we have introduced legislation to deal with the 100% mortgages? These are some of the issues that we might have been prepared to look at, or to have rowed back earlier on some of the tax-related property reliefs.

Secondly, I think, as I said, I think some of the public spending, based on what I call transient taxes ... we were incurring recurring expenditure, I suppose, based on taxes from the property sector, and that was a mistake. I think benchmarking, we should have benchmarked public sector salaries to public sector salaries elsewhere, rather than to public sector ... to private sector salaries in Ireland. I think that was-----