Mr. Lar Bradshaw:

I want to go back to April 1997 when the then Minister for the Environment, Deputy Brendan Howlin, and the then Minister for Finance, Deputy Ruairí Quinn, met me and asked me to do this. Members will recall that I mentioned in my opening statement that there were a few issues that needed to be sorted out. The first issue, and my immediate response at the time was, "That sounds like a fantastic project but I cannot do it because I have got a conflict of interest." They asked what it was. I said that I had two minor shareholdings in two property syndicates in the docklands, a 4% interest and an 8% interest. I said I had clearly got a perception of a conflict so I could not do this. The Minister, Deputy Ruairí Quinn, said, "No, that is not the way it works." He said that to get the people of the right calibre, willing to do a project like this, it would be a case that there would be lots of conflicts for lots of people and that the thing to do was just manage them in a transparent way.

I have to say I was very impressed with both Ministers, for a very particular reason, not alone for the way they set out the vision of what they were trying to achieve but that they also said they were not interested in making appointments based on political affiliation. One of the reasons they were talking to me was that I was completely apolitical. There had been much talk down through the years of how appointments were made to boards such as this. I was impressed with the integrity of the way they spoke about how they saw the vision of the area and what they were trying to achieve with the social and economic situation. I took both Ministers at their word and that the issue was to manage everything in a transparent fashion.

I went along to the first board meeting in 1997 and told that story and announced my conflict of interest. I wanted it written into the record. If one goes back and gets the minutes of the first board meeting one will see it as it is there for all to see. I expected everybody else to behave in exactly the same way. We worked hard at how to deal with conflicts of interest. Many years later, in 2009, one can imagine my shock when I read an article by a journalist, Nick Webb, who said he had discovered this secret that I had these two interests, as if it was some poorly kept secret. I was completely shocked. I had announced it at my first board meeting. I was doing exactly what the then Minister for Finance, Deputy Ruairí Quinn, and the then Minister for the Environment, Deputy Brendan Howlin, had suggested I do. We spent much time over the years talking, discussing, getting advice as to how to manage conflicts of interest, upgrading our advice and thinking it through in great detail. I want to give the context of how we thought. I took it extremely seriously.