 I'd like to compliment the IEA as well and their great work. It provides a great forum for the nature change of ideas. We're firmly in Europe and we intend staying there. I'm committed to European myself that this forum gives us an opportunity to share ideas and discuss issues. It's very important in civil society that organizations such as this would be there to reinforce democracy. It's my third time in government, as Brendan said. This one is entirely different. It's also different in Europe. I go over back to Brussels and Luxembourg quite a lot and things have changed from the previous council meetings I used to attend. It's got very informal. It's all first names now. It's Michael and Christine and Elena and Wolfgang and everyone chats away all the time. So that's very comforting. Secondly, English has become the lingua franca of the community. Occasional breaks into French. But compared to what it was like when I started in the 80s when everybody spoke their national language and you were picking it up in your earphone. It made it very stilted and formal. Now since they're all fluent English speakers it moves all of them back in real debate. And it's quite interesting. That makes it interesting for ministers in one way and difficult in another way because in the olden days, if I call the 80s the olden days ministers frequently use the pre-prepared speaking note and just read it out to give the national policy position. Now there's a real debate that goes on all the time and you're challenged on your views across the table. You need to know where you stand and where your country stands and hold up your side. So that's probably the good side of it. The downside of it is that the commission isn't as strong as it was when I was, say, Minister for Industry and Commerce dealing with the internal market. The bigger countries now are taking a lead role. That's even truer in the 17 rather than the 27 because in the 17 there's a tendency called France and Germany to think of the euro as their project and not only did they put it together in the first instance but they feel responsible for keeping it going and keeping it strong. So in that respect, the commission isn't as central as it was and that's bad for Ireland. So one of our policy positions is to always be committed to keeping the role of the commission strong and reinforcing it if we can because big countries, all countries act ultimately in their own interest and big countries always act on their own interest in the long term and smaller countries need to have the protection of their own collegiality and also the protection of the commission. So I think that's a very important point. It's also the case now that the IMF and the ECB are equal partners at meetings. So again that has diminished the role of the commission somewhat but the IMF is a different IMF from the kind of IMF that was portrayed as intervening and wrecking the lives of poor people in sub-Saharan Africa. It's a totally different IMF now and the present IMF leadership is very supportive of Europe and Christine Lagarde is particularly supportive of the Irish position and is very, very helpful. Firstly, to get down to a few words I want to share with you the euro has been a great success. The euro was put in place 12 years ago and since then over the 12 years inflation in Europe has always been below 2% annual inflation. It actually has been a better corrector of inflation than the German mark that Germans like so much. As well as that European trade has increased by 50% since the euro was established and that has led to growth and wealth and good lifestyles for European citizens. As well as that the value of the currency has gone up. Even now that it's under stress it's in the 130s where the euro has been put in place I think it's after the 117 to 120 around the era. And you'll notice that when the Swiss wanted to bring down the value of the Swiss franc recently just four or five weeks ago they didn't benchmark against the yen or the dollar or go back to the gold standard they benchmarked against the euro at 120 which was a very recent vote of confidence in the future of the euro and also in the value of the euro. So I think we should remember that the crisis is not a euro crisis the crisis is a euro land crisis and it's the difficulties in certain countries including Ireland to adopt to a common currency. That's the crisis, not the currency itself and we can be very confident in the currency itself. The reason that there is a problem in euro land is that when the currency was put in place 12 years ago the kind of policy instruments which will be familiar to anybody who knows the United States were never put in place in euro. Things like automatic stabilizers fiscal transfers fiscal bonds being issued by the Fed none of those are available in Europe. So when the euro came under threat the policy instruments weren't in place to defend it and then there was a mad scramble to retrofit the policy instruments to protect the currency and in that mad scramble I'm afraid European leadership has failed until very recently to get ahead of the curve but it's not that nothing was done, a lot was done you know just this time last year there was no ESFF there was no ESFM there was no ESM agreed so you know we have other institutions in Europe now that can give money to countries like ourselves in Portugal and programs none of that was in place 12 months ago when the first bailout for Greece occurred it was done on a series of bilateral arrangements but now there's an institutional framework to deal with that and of course issues of governance have come up the line as well and there is a great movement on that but the failure all the time has been that over the two year period particularly in the last 12 months the solutions have fallen short of the problem and while the markets would be convinced for a week or two or three market turbulence would reassert itself that the solutions were proven adequate so the building of the policy instruments has to continue at long last we thought we had a major breakthrough at the heads meeting last week because for the first time rather than taking individual problems and trying to tailor a solution to them there was an approach to have a comprehensive and integrated solution and I would think it was a very good approach you know recapitalize the banks and deal with all against contagion deal with Greece advance the governance issues so that we don't go back into this again in two or three years time make the fix a generational fix and finally have a growth program for Europe by structural reform across the community and encourage individual growth programs in individual economies that's the package that's there now and you know we thought we had a solution and I think we have a solution institutionally when the work continues and these proposals are fleshed out but then Mr Papandreou called the referendum and that has thrown the markets into chaos again and I presume there are political problems in Greece and I suggest that the solutions will have to be political I've said already to a number of people that you know democracies live by elections and we should never fear changes of government in the last year you remember would the Greenstein government would the leave government would the budget go through would the budget not go through would the government continue would the heaven and charity would the finance bill go through should there be a new leader should there be a new Teshik is there going to be leadership even for you to fall so we shouldn't be surprised when we look at Greece because we've had a very recent experience with a donor leader in an election and usually in a change of administration so you know that's democracy and in the nation which founded democracy I don't think we should be looking to a scans at the fact that they are now look as if the government may be losing its mandate or indeed Mr Papandreou may be strong enough to reassert himself and move forward but I think the solutions of the firewall the gap and all the rest of it are the solutions on which the new Europe will be built on which the currency will be stabilised because for the first time we will have instruments of policy along the lines of the United States which I suppose is the most successful common currency area that we can bring forward as an example and you know imitation is a sincerest form of flattery but if something is working well there are policy instruments that you can model and bring them in for the Europe well then that's what should be done I'd like now to move to our own government here we're seven months in office I think it's an open secret that we we're surprised ourselves that we are further up the road than we thought we'd be just seven months ago we're fulfilling the programme and that's being acknowledged by all our colleagues in Europe and by the European authorities we're also restoring Ireland's reputation in Europe we had a bad reputation I think it came from the Celtic Tiger there was a lot of hubris and there was a lot of arrogance and I'm not just talking about a political level you know we had Irish people lecturing Europeans on how to get rich by selling houses to each other and and they said that's a bubble and now they were inclined to say I told you so when the thing collapsed there was a bad feel there was a very bad feel but we have repaired that the Tarnished have brought all the diplomatic corps back to Dublin and kind of reset the programme for the diplomatic corps and they're they're on a single message now lobbying influential people right across Europe ministers are attending all the council meetings and our staffs are integrating and mixing and making friends and we have a lot of friends in Europe and our reputation has improved and that's very important because you know the thing give a dog a bad name and a lot of what's happening in Greece is give a dog a bad name if you look at their all figures in Greece in terms of the government making fiscal corrections they have made huge strides and yet they're getting no credit at all and you get caricatured images of Greece in the media so reputation does matter it allows you to move forward we're growing again economically the first two quarters have shown significant growth the third quarter we know from many total evidences growing as well and even though we'll have to mark down growth for next year it will still be quite positive growth in our customer countries are falling away and if you have an export growth model obviously if your customers can't buy as much you have to pull back a little bit but we'll use the best evidence in putting the budgetary figures together and we had last April said the growth into 12 would be 2.5% it won't be that now and we'd be pulling it back so that our budget calculations are realistic we're in balance of payments surplus as well and we're going to have another strong surplus in the balance of payments this year and that's very good news as well because if you're earning more than you're spending it's not a definition of insolvency anyway so balance of payments surplus is a measurement of insolvency it's not the only one but it's also very good news if you take Greece about 20% of its economy in exports over 100% of the Irish economy is volume exports a huge difference in the model and in terms of the reputation we're always stressing that Ireland has far more in common with the North European economies like the UK and the Netherlands and Germany in terms of the way we're structured in terms of our competitiveness in terms of the way we do business then we have with the peripheral economies of the Mediterranean where we were bracketed until recently so in terms of resetting the reputation of the country we're strongly pushing the line that we're a North European economy we're prepared to do things of the way and our Europeans do things with their economies and we're prepared to take the correction measures necessary to stay in that group of countries rather than on the Mediterranean group the banks have been restructured as well if you'd be familiar with that that has been quite successful we were very fortunate to get private sector interest in Bank of Ireland and that was one of the confidence building measures during the summer the banks are still building confidence there's an inflow of deposits now in September and October so after deposits declining for a long period they're growing again and also the banks are accessing money on the market so the banks are actually back in the markets now the banks are getting a wholesale a couple of the banks have that wholesale money at 4% on 3 month rollover basis so Ireland may be out of the market but as soon as you get the banks going back in we're moving in the right direction we've renegotiated the program as well you know we said we would and we got a mandate to do it but we don't see renegotiations as a ones off event we see it as a rolling event and we have two phases of it behind us and there's a third phase coming up the first phase was around the time of the jobs initiative I suppose the flag there was the minimum wage but it was only a minor part of it and what was there was we got permission to bring the vet rate down from 13.5 to 9 and to focus on the hospitality industry because you know tourism obviously has to be one of the big industries in Ireland and it had fallen off by 30% over 3 years and all the infrastructure is there it doesn't require additional investment the hotels, the golf courses, the airports the roads it's all there so what you need really is to make the country competitive this was an attempt at that and it worked as well as well as that the adjustment period for the programme is now going to 215 so we negotiated an extra year for the correction process the second phase of the negotiation was something that we argued long and hard that the programme was incorrectly priced and that the interest rates were too high and after kind of five months of constant battle and argument we got that revised in July at the heads of state meeting we got interest rates reduced to effectively the cost of the money on the bond market without margins being added that has made a huge difference it makes a difference like in this year's budget now we'd be in extreme difficulty if we didn't have the interest rate reduction because it reduces our costs on interest rates by about 900 million and that compensates for the fall off and the growth rates which I drew your attention to and for some fall off and better seats as well doesn't give us extra money to spend but if we didn't have it we'd be in dreadful difficulty going into this budget and now it has the swings have cancelled out the roundabouts and this was one of the big swings the third phase of the negotiations is very important and it's something that we're trying to position we want the overall burden of debt to be reduced and this is the argument that we use when we're talking about the promissory note in England Wires Bank but that's an example to get the issue on the table in Europe and we're open to suggestions from them as to other means of reducing the overall burden of debt because while we are sustainable I would prefer if we were 15 or 20 billion lower on the overall burden of debt going back into the markets in 2013 so this phase of renegotiation is more a medium term project but we have set up our negotiating positions already and they're engaging with us they haven't said they'll cut the debt yet but they're engaging with us in preparing policy papers so while I can't tell you that this is going to happen I can tell you there's a process in place which may lead to we getting a reduction in the overall burden of our debt by some mechanism which we will identify as things go forward so I'm quite confident about the future of Europe you can lose your way if you just look at particular events but if you can rise above particular events and look forward Europe is very strong it has 27 democracies working together I mean it's not so long I'll go back to the time when the Berlin Wall was still there and Eastern Europe and it's great civilization was like something that where the deluge had come in and kind of cities that we know from our history books have disappeared from view now Eastern Europe is back there they're in with us, they're thriving Poland has the presidency at the minute they're just having, after having a successful election from the government's point of view because they are re-elected and they're thriving they're moving forward, they're shall grow Eastern Europe they really love the community they really aspire to be members of the community and they're working it hard so we shouldn't be cynical about the community the European project is an absolutely marvelous project it's one of the most historic things that has happened in this generation or in any other generation and we shouldn't let it slip from us through lack of effort there are difficulties one is the diminishing role of the commission which I referred to already another is I suppose the best way of putting it is the growing nationalism across European countries that's an emerging problem which we need to watch very carefully and it's manifesting itself all the time now at council meetings where ministers say quite openly I'd agree to that but I can't get it through my parliament because we have coalition partners on the right or on the left they're taking a very narrow nationalistic view and the country's interest coming before the community's interest and that making it difficult to go forward and you know examples of it across Europe in different countries you've seen the true fins on the part that played in the election in Finland so it's something I just want to put a marker down on the other thing I think where Arlene can play a role is the danger of two Europe's you know there are 17 in the Euro and there's 27 all together and we meet as the Euro group first in Brussels and then we meet at 17 and then we meet at 27 and there is a danger that you'll get two agendas you'll get two policy agendas emerging so I think Ireland and the smaller countries have a role it's in our interest to keep Europe integrated but it has a unit of 27 and not a kind of a twin track Europe with a 17 in the common currencies led by France and Germany driving it forward and the 27 been somewhat adrift you know already there have been suggestions on the margin that as the 10 nations that aren't in the Euro see us meeting every month as a group of 17 and all key decisions in effect now being taken in the group of 17 and being wrong by the 27 subsequently I've heard suggestions that the 10 should start meeting separately you're going down a very dangerous road if that happens so it's again as I presume many of you here are interested Europeans I'm flagging one of the risks I see and I'm flagging an area where Ireland can help to integrate so generally I'm optimistic the budget is coming forward and we'll deal with that the first budgetary document will be published tomorrow and there will be a lot of economic analysis about where we are and what the basis for the assumptions of where we are but more importantly there will be a table in it which will set the targets for the deficit right up to 215 with the one in 215 being below 30% and it will go on then to say what the annual quantum of adjustment will be in each budget up to 215 to arrive at those targets and the quantum will be divided between tax increases and expenditure reductions now we're obviously doing this at the interest of transparency and accountability but more importantly we think that many of our people both in their personal lives and in their business lives are very uncertain of the future and actually think that things are worse than they are and we think that this will help to build confidence by putting it out starkly this is where we're now this is how we're going to get to minus 3 by 215 and these are the modifications we have to make in each budget going forward we won't be breaking it down department by department that will happen later on because there's going to be a number of pre-budget announcements and my colleague Brendan Howlin will give the break down the department the break down before the budget itself so thank you very much you've been a very attentive audience I hope I haven't bored the pens off here so I love the question