Dr. Elaine Byrne:

I will take the argument of Ireland being a small country. I made a presentation to the banking inquiry. One of my key recommendations was that Ireland stop using the small country bogeyman argument as a way of explaining the culture in Ireland. There is no measure in any academic or international institute of governance which shows that being a small country makes a country better or worse in terms of corruption. I will give one brief example. Here are the top five countries in the world that are least corrupt according to the Transparency International corruption perception index which has parallels with the World Bank indices. Denmark is the least corrupt country in the world. It has a population of 5.5 million. New Zealand is also one of the least corrupt countries in the world, and its population of 4.2 million is lower than Ireland's. Sweden has a population of 9.2 million, Singapore has a population of 4.8 million, Finland has a population of 5.3 million. All of these countries have populations that are about the same or less than Ireland's; all are small countries and are least corrupt in the world. The corollary of that argument is that countries with large populations therefore are culturally not as corrupt. I will now list countries that are considered more corrupt or have problems with the governance mechanism and rank lower than Ireland in terms of their governance capability. The United Kingdom has a population of 62 million, Belgium has a population of 10 million, Italy has a population of 60 million, Poland has a population of 38 million, and all of these countries are regarded as more corrupt or have more difficulties with their governance than Ireland.

I feel very angry about this. As I have written a book on the history of corruption in Ireland, we use the excuse of Ireland being a small country to excuse our behaviour. It has nothing to do with the population size of a country, because if one looks at some of the least corrupt countries in the world one will see they have very low populations and are smaller societies than Ireland. The sooner psychologically we get rid of that argument, perhaps the quicker we can move on.

I will leave it to my colleagues-----