Professor Patrick Honohan:

We are constantly having reviews and there is a statutory requirement to have a review every four years of what we do. We had a team, organised by the IMF and coming from different international regulators, which was looking at our insurance sector. I had a general first meeting with them, at which they said they noted how in my report, I had stated the 2006 financial sector assessment program, FSAP, review of the Irish financial sector was unhelpful because it made no criticisms. As they said they were hoping to be helpful this time, I am anticipating several criticisms from that. There is heightened awareness. A lot of what we are talking about here has happened all over the world. There is heightened awareness of the need to be more intrusive. We are doing it, everybody else is doing it and some of those old models are being discarded. It is very important for the nation for us not to have some concept that as a nation, we have been uniquely stupid in this environment. We obviously have made big mistakes and have been badly hit but we have done so by doing things that have happened in more or less the same way in a dozen other countries, just not on the same scale. Why was this on a big scale here? It was the momentum from our success in the Celtic tiger and the momentum of our entry into the European monetary union with cheap finance. That is what gave us that launch from which to make the whole thing so big that we could not cope with it. If one went down to the other countries, one would find similar criticisms being made of what they did. We will not do it the next time. The next time, there will be some other problem.