 Well, ladies and gentlemen, Mr Chairman, it's a great pleasure for me to be here and thank you for the invitation to play this role. Let me tell you at the outset that I am not going to read to you a prepared text, so this is not something that was taken from the deep freeze to be put in the microwave today. It's freshly baked, but it may not be especially perfect. Had the timing of this been a week or two ago, we would have been on the eve of Bloomsday, and I think perhaps if I was describing what you're about to listen to, it's a bit of a stream of consciousness, but not with the elegance of Joyceian phraseology. The first thing I'd like to do is to thank the Institute of International European Affairs and the European Commission for undertaking this initiative, and both to those present and those who have left a great word of gratitude to the participants who contributed as speakers and to all those, including all of those of you still here, who have been participants at this conference. The timing of course was deliberate, although picked long in advance, lucky that it actually happened to coincide precisely with the European summit, and especially lucky that it happened to coincide with two significant Italian victories in the last 24 hours. One of them the sports one has been remarked by one or two speakers, but I think the other, it's by no means an exclusive victory for Italian diplomacy, but I've little doubt that the European experience of Mario Monte was a critical part of the chemistry of consent by of course putting some sand in the cogs of the wheels late enough yesterday evening to cause people to sit up and take some notice of some of the issues that in other terms risk to be deferred for another occasion. It has been said here today by Patrick Honohan that we now have a sense from yesterday of direction with political backing, and I think the new initiatives especially in the so-called banking union area are particularly important because I agree very much with the very summary, high summary phrase of President Herman van Rompuy to the media in the small hours of the morning, that it's designed to try to attempt to break the vicious circle between sovereigns and banking, and I think that is good. I think the union itself has shown a considerable capacity to learn by doing, certainly and it started today already with the remarks of Barbara Nolan. Then several speakers talked about the pace of democratic decision making in a complex union with multi-level governance and the multiplicity of interests and not always interests which run in the same direction, and the instantaneous quality of market reaction, and these are two very different time cycles. My own sense for what it's worth, and I've said this before, I think we need to bring the decision making system of what Brendan Halligan today referred to as the toolkit. I think he said Mr. Van Rompuy admitted when he arrived in his job he looked in the kit and there were no tools. It's a pretty good description for a deal of what has been learned, but I think in this regard that the development of a toolkit which has three characteristics is important. I would call it a political triple A rating. The first day is about assessment in depth with conditionality as a consequence, and clearly we have moved in that direction and we may deepen that. The second day is about the availability of a sufficient volume of funds, whether through the ESM and or funding capacity of the European Central Bank or the residual funds of the financial stability facility. So the second day about availability, and the third day is to find in Europe the toolkit that permits a degree of automaticity, that if you're in this space there is an agent, there is an agency, there is a capacity to respond. Because every time that we have a response that lacks that quasi or actual automaticity we will have exactly the time cycle clash between the quality of markets and the quality of European decision-making. I think the sooner we can get our decision-making process into this political triple A zone of assessment with conditionality and in-depth availability of sufficient funds and of a degree of automaticity of response we risk to have the triple A to do with states and their credit rating or banks and their credit rating stay in a period of extended stress. I'm reminded of a speech today that A. J. Trappler gave to Trinity College students during one of his visits here to Dublin where he chose to introduce his speech by quoting the Roman dramatist and philosopher of in and around the time of Christ and after Seneca. And I give you the quote, when a man does not know to which port he steers, no wind will be favourable. And I think there's a lot of wisdom in that quote. And a large part of Europe's search to a response to this crisis has been indeed to try to distill down what is the question, what are the questions. And I take my cue from that Seneca question, what is the port, to say that I think today has been very good on this. I think a lot of our speakers from many different angles and perspectives and places coalesce around this question of trying to understand the question and what is the question. I was struck today by the nature of John Bruton's opening analysis. The origins of a crisis, he said, being deeper than finance. And I think it's at its own for the day. The finance part is important, but it's not the whole part. And I think there's much weight in what he said. The emphasis he said on adjustment that is respectful of underlying social solidarity is to do with striking a balance, an important dimension, a question that's indispensable to the evolution of the policymaking. He challenged the narrowness of the wise men analysis, the references by Herman Van Rompuy to a greater role, modestly quoted in terms of the number of sentences of European Parliament and national parliaments. And he said we need more. We need the energy of direct democracy that someone of these presidents has to go and search for a mandate and search through that mandate for the shaping of the big issues of governance and in a way that respects, because you need a plurality of votes across the union, that respects the diversity of the circumstances and the needs of different states. I dare say for what it's worth, but this is not the time in a closing speech to develop it at length, I actually think this question needs another dimension as well. I have a deep conviction that in its own terms the process of European integration has been a powerful gift to several generations of Europeans and I believe that Ireland's engagement in it has been a powerful gift to the nation and to the people of Ireland. But I have been disturbed in the course of this crisis for some reasons which I can appreciate, but for other reasons about which I remain anxious, that larger states have of course a large say, but that they've exercised this in a way that has appeared to exclude others and to be fully open to the voice of smaller states. And I do think if there's a new politics emerging to do with the sharing of sovereignty in more spaces, that as well as direct democracy, part of this equation has got to look at the recalibration of the balances that validate the rights of all without confusing the scale of all as being equal in scale. For my own part I've often used the formula about our own small state that we are not in the construction of Europe a tale and the European dog. We are through our own democracy, constitutional rights and shared sovereignty, a perfectly formed if small dog in our own right. And it's nice that we should be friendly and wag our tail a lot, but we should also reserve the right occasionally to bark and to bite on our own account. And it seems to me that this capacity has been somewhat absent, not just to do with ourselves, but to do with the willingness of others to listen. And I think if we're having a discussion that touches on politics, this should be a part of it. I'm reminded too very much of a phrase that comes from Italy from the Conti Cavour. After Garibaldi's unification 150, well this year, 151 years ago, he said, We have made Italy, and now we must make or find our Italians. Well I think in a way one of these issues now comes up again. We have made Europe, we are now remaking it, crisis is reshaping it, globalization is reshaping it, but we cannot do it without our Europeans. I think Europe as a project of the elites or a new compact to do with political, fiscal banking union and so on, that is wholly exclusively and only driven by the structuralism of circumstance, is a deficient Europe if it doesn't have somewhere the heartbeat of engagement and active citizenship. And I would agree with those commentators today who spoke about that. John Bruton and Alan Lamassour, in their own way, both touched on the need to avoid being imprisoned by what is just good for oneself. That there is that wider sense of mission. Alan Lamassour reminded me of the three musketeers when he asked us to operate all for one and one for all. But he was again touching on that essential European-ness of finding the way the via media to work through this. His sense, and I think John Bruton sense earlier today, once once the omelette is made to quote Alan, you cannot retrieve the eggs, as he said. And indeed we've had a very interesting economic debate there, whether or not to do with interests, capacity, and the evolution of this crisis over time, whether the omelette could be unmade or not or whether it should be unmade and where the different interests might lie. If I parked those political questions, I think a very interesting second set of questions came in the economic and financial domain. What should we expect from a banking union for Europe and for Ireland? Carl Whelan today gave, I think, a very erudite exposition of the diversity of Irish bank debt, of the difference between the debt for dead banks and for others that hope to have a future. He raised the question if we get European funding as a result of what happened yesterday and with its evolution in policy substance over the coming months, what would be fair value if the European stability mechanism was giving money, investing money in the Irish case? How would you deal with all of this in getting the money and deal with the implicit sense that it's a second bailout? And how do we in Ireland prepare the way to get back on markets but to get our share of what's available? And we need to develop this discourse, not to be frightened of it. We may not want to call it a bailout. Let's find what the language is and let's work our way through that. I taught his analysis about the complexity of retrofitting Irish debt to do with any new European model was particularly interesting. Governor Patrick Honahan then, in quoting the IEA study of 20 years ago, and indeed his own part, but which in all modesty he didn't himself recite, but Brendan Halligan reminders of that, reminded me a little bit of a sign that I saw many years ago on a visit to Bray. For those visiting Ireland, Bray is a seaside town in County Wicklow, south of Dublin, and it had in a lovely sunny day a little sign in a window for a fortune teller, and it said, Madam Lisa, your past, your present, and your future foretold. And it seems to me, think about it, foretelling your past was one of the things in a kind of a way this issue reminded me of today. And I think Jens is here in the audience with us. I think drew up a very interesting second channel about the sovereign banking crisis, which wasn't the one that we know in Ireland of a stressed sovereign loaded with the socialized debt of bank recapitalization, but a different thing. The kind of Italian example I suppose is the biggest one on his bar chart, if I could see it at the distance I was of a very large debt to GDP ratio that traditionally and without problem has been financed and refinanced by Italian banks. But when the sovereign starts to hit a crisis, it feeds back naturally into the banks. So almost the reverse of the Irish case, the more the sovereign is stressed, if so fact or the more the banks are stressed. So whether you're coming at it through the Irish route in or the Italian route sovereign out, the banking union thing clearly is very central. I thought Patrick Hohn had made a number of important, drew a number of important distinctions that an Irish audience, particularly in political debate, needs to keep a clear focus on. The clear distinction between that part of our indebtedness, which is banking related, and that part of the public indebtedness, which is the underlying budgetary case. And as we see, the budgetary part is the most significant part, even though the banking part is by no means negligible. I think the second thing which is interesting and frequently absent from appreciation in Ireland is the extent to which public official funding has managed to slow down the Irish adjustment process and curiously difficult as it is to render it less brutal than it might be in the absence of such funding. I suppose that's hard enough to appreciate, but it is, I think, conceptually and empirically, a very strong observation not to be set to one side. The question was this summit a seismic event. The Taoiseach said yes this morning, I heard him on the radio. Carl Whelan expressed his doubts. Patrick Hohn had called it an important turning point. My own summary is I think it was a seismic event because it was groundbreaking and ground changing. And for that reason I think it's seismic. But I would still hold my judgment on how powerful will it be on the economic Richter scale because we need to see how far and how fast will its implications go. Donald Donovan raised a very interesting question. I go back to my tale or dog analogy about Ireland. Can we Irish contribute more? I think the answer is yes. And I think this institution is a leading example of it. We have things to say. We have capacity, political, intellectual, experiential which is powerfully real. And we should not trade it off only and always to wonder what is the implication of someone else's thought process for its impact on our small state. That is the great part of pooling sovereignty. You lose bits but you gain bits. Please do not squander our say in the bigger space by simply the reductionism of wondering always its impact on us without bringing to it our own legitimate and valid view, not overstated, but not to be underestimated if it is coherent and broadly disinterested in terms of the broader project. I think in terms of locating the future and where all this brings us today shows that we need to deepen these kinds of reflections. I was fascinated by an exchange between Peter Matthews and John Bruton this morning about the respective guesstimates of what the size of the Spanish banking bailout could be and it reminded me of what is my favorite quote in this regard which I share with you from Nils Bohr, the Danish physicist who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1923. Bohr said, spelled B-O-H-O or not B-O-O-R-E. He said, prediction, he said, is very difficult, especially when it's about the future. Joseph Janning of the EPC and I'm bringing my remarks to the chairman to a close, underlined the way in which for many years there were some key questions we chose to avoid and this crisis has crystallized those questions in a way that makes them unavoidable and striking the new balances. For example, the consequences of adjusting Europe to the new global realities of the 21st century, touched on by many speakers but not wholly developed at length today, striking the balances and interests between creditors and debtors, understanding true federalism because true federalism is some part which needs strengthening of the center but counterparts which need logically strengthening of the periphery and in other words, not some large Euro homogenization as federalism but something with subtleties and shades of gray. The backdoor logic I rather liked. I think we've had Europe by small steps of integration. If something bigger is coming, if a moment of distillation, of crystallization that gives a big choice between more integration or disintegration, if that is the moment whose moment has come to slightly recycle the phrase of Patrick Honahan today, then I think it's a moment that we should confront through the backdoor, welcome it in through the front door, excuse me, and close that backdoor, recognize it as a generational moment, a big question not a small one, worthy of intellectual rigor and honesty in our political discourse, precisely because so much is at stake. And if we go after it honestly, there's no necessary reason with the collective experience we have that if what is available is good, it cannot be argued for. So today, even as we've explored their margins, tomorrow's Europe, how wide, how deep, how democratic, how fundamental the change, I think it all calls for honesty and debate of which today has been a good example. I think we are approaching a rather bigger rather than a smaller moment, one that can have a generational sense about the choice and a multi-generational consequence in terms of the answers. And we should have the self-confidence, no arrogance, but based on our experience, based on our needs, and based on our capacity to step into this debate, willing to lead and not only to follow and to understand that where you bring that capacity with an honesty and a vigor, it's not your size that counts, it's your imagination.