Professor John FitzGerald:

There was no consultation whatsoever with us. Relations would have been frosty and the Department would not have wanted to come and talk to us about this. To my knowledge, there was no discussion prior to the guarantee. Subsequent to it, the Minister came to meet people in the institute. I have here the dates, which were 14 January and 20 March 2009. I may then have met the Minister on 5 October. I met him with David Duffy on 11 February 2010. Finally, I was at a meeting with the Taoiseach, the Governor of the Central Bank and Minister for Finance, at which many officials were present, on 16 October 2010.

In the meetings with the Minister in 2009 we concentrated on issues other than the financial sector because we had not done research on that area. One area that did feature was our research on the public sector pay premium which the Minister discussed with my colleagues who were experts in that area. There was a range of issues in that the discussion was in our area of expertise, fiscal policy, how we were to get out of the mess. I specifically remember that when he raised the issue – and he was interested in our advice on the financial sector – we said he should talk to Patrick Honohan in Trinity College, he was the expert on that. That happened either at the meeting on 14 January or on 20 March 2009.