Dr. Elaine Byrne:

Broadly. I think, until the mid-1990s, politics in Ireland and political behaviour were self-regulated. In the book, I go through different instances where the suggestion of regulating political behaviour was seen as not trusting politicians and how dare someone suggest such things. In particular, Ms Eithne FitzGerald, when she was Minister of State with responsibility for labour affairs in the early 1990s, received incredible abuse for suggesting that politicians needed to have conflicts of interest and so forth. The suggestion that to do so would be abhorrent. We had very much a self-regulating culture in Ireland, whether it was in politics or the church or professions. Each of the professions has its own organisation that self-regulates behaviour. As we have seen through the crash, a lot of things were dealt with in-house and probably did not receive the appropriate legal attention that they should have.