Michael Noonan (Limerick City, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Whether it's temporary or permanent is a matter for the Taoiseach and whoever the next Taoiseach is. It's a ... it's really ... there is a lot of, in my view, exaggeration about its role, and the criticism of it I don't agree with. It's effectively another Cabinet sub-committee, and it was a Cabinet sub-committee designed and put in place to deal on a weekly basis with the programme. I mean, by the end of the programme, we had implemented 290 separate and distinct measures and you needed some way of processing that level of intervention across Government Departments in co-ordinating it, and that's what the EMC did. But it had no authority, no more than any Cabinet committee, to make decisions on behalf of the Cabinet and decisions had to be taken back to Cabinet, if it required a Cabinet decision.