 Thank you very much for those opening remarks. I guess if we start off in agreement on the importance of philosophy and history, I think we can't go wrong. I suppose let me just firstly thank the Institute for inviting me. And I'm conscious of the many prestigious speakers who have spoken here and who often, I suspect, provided insightful strategic perspectives on various aspects of European development. My ambition is somewhat more modest. My aim is to bring to your attention the perspective of the plumber rather than of the architect of a public servant engaged in the day-to-day work of trying to develop new financial sector regulatory framework and to deal with the practical challenges of the Irish presidency. We can, I hope, do that without technical details overwhelming us, though it is a technical area. And I will certainly resist the temptation to use this opportunity to complain about the problems of booking rooms in the Justice Lipsious building or of maintaining connectivity when one is in Brussels. Such details do matter, but now that the presidency is over, perhaps the best thing to do is just draw a veil over them. To that end, I'll begin by saying that I want to focus maybe on making a few slightly more challenging remarks about the presidency and some of the issues that arise. And to that end, I think I'll begin by saying that I'll make my remarks in a personal individual capacity rather than seeking to represent the position of the central bank. And that hopefully will give me just a little additional freedom, maybe to say something a little bit more challenging or pointed in my remarks. The end of the Irish presidency at midnight on the 1st of July closed our seventh presidency since we joined the European Union 40 years ago. The bare facts are that we concluded over 80 policy commitments during our presidency. The agreements were from a broad range of areas. Some high profile, others not. There has been widespread praise from Manuel Barroso, Jonathan Foll, Sharon Bowles, and other similar figures for our presidency. But perhaps it was the FT's Peter Spiegel who put it most succinctly when he said, there was a focus on the Irish to get some serious things through, and they actually did it. Non-financial highlights included early successes on the so-called Twin PAC regulation to improve budgetary and economic coordination among eurozone countries, and then the multi-annual financial framework agreement between the presidency and the European Parliament. Major reforms were achieved in the CAP and the Fisheries Policy, and there are other less publicized achievements such as the regulation establishing European border surveillance system. But it won't surprise you that I intend to focus on the financial services files, and in particular, the securities market focused files. At the start of the presidency Ireland took over 20 financial services files at different stages of completion. These represented many of the elements of the complex regulatory response to the EU, of the EU, to the financial crisis. Almost 40 central bank staff provided technical advice and support to various Department of Finance teams put together to deal with these dossiers. By the end of the presidency, 11 files reached policy commitments in legislative form. The largest ever for any presidency and comparable with six for the Danes and six for Cyprus. I want to focus my remarks broadly on the theme of compromise and the pursuit of consensus by a presidency. What kind of compromises gets files across the line? Do those compromises represent best outcomes for the EU? And how does a presidency organize its resources to achieve those compromises? Arguably the most important of all the dossiers undertaken by Ireland was CRD4, which was based on the Basel 3 proposals prepared by the Basel Committee to improve the regulation of banks, taking into account the lessons of the crisis. The agreement of CRD4 in March 2013 was to no little degree, in my view, the result of the decision of the Department of Finance to pull in their central bank technical advisors, my banking policy colleagues, to take a central role with them in the trilog process. I will say some more in a moment about these kinds of tactical issues which arise in a presidency. But if the success of the Irish presidency rested heavily on getting the CRD4 through, it was our success with the whole banking regulatory package, which I think surprised many. Other key proposals, namely the single supervisory mechanism and the banking resolution and recovery directive, were also outstanding when Ireland started its presidency and both were brought through. I should mention that the mortgage credit directive was also agreed. The matter is not finished, of course. Banking unions still remains in play. The single resolution mechanism proposals just released. And further work remains on the deposit guarantee scheme. But there can be little doubt now about the capacity of the EU to agree a package of banking regulatory reforms. The big question about this package is, of course, still worth asking. Does it amount, taken with the restructuring of the EU regulatory bodies done in 2010 to an appropriate proportionate and effective response to the risks highlighted by the crisis? Here in Ireland, the central bank has openly recognized its supervisory failings leading to the crisis. It did too little, too late, to prevent the property price bubble fueled by bank lending, which has amounted to one of the worst banking crises any country has had to endure in modern times. An important part of that failure was the inadequate level of challenge to the banks by the central bank. For any of you who want to look a little further at how we have tried to address this, my colleague William, my former colleague, I should say William Mason, now Director General of the Guernsey Financial Services Commission, made what I think is a very useful speech back in May 2012, which you can get on the internet, which will explain how we have developed risk-based supervision in order to create that capacity for challenge to deal with the failings by the central bank at that time. However, challenge by a supervisor can only be as good as the rules it is enforcing. It is widely recognized internationally that the Basel II regulatory framework was inadequate to the role of banking in influencing asset prices in an increasingly globalized economy. Capital was too low, regulatory arbitrage was too easy, liquidity was not properly regulated. CRD-4 sets out to fix that. For the broader European Union, the question of whether CRD-4 is adequate to that task has probably been well debated, and I don't propose to add to it here. It may, however, be worth asking if there is a question which has not been discussed here in Ireland and in other small or peripheral EU countries as to whether the CRD-4 framework, which Ireland has succeeded in pushing through, would have provided the appropriate regulatory framework, which a robust Irish central bank could use to challenge and prevent another asset price bubble fueled by internationally sourced leverage into this small open economy operating within a monetary union. I doubt there's a simple answer to that question, but we can confidently say that the three main pieces of the CRD-4, tougher liquidity rules, better quality capital, and a non-risk weighted leverage ratio should assist regulators throughout the EU if and when another asset bubble emerges, as it surely will. Banking regulation is the natural focus for most commentators given the centrality of banking to European financial markets. However, my division within the central bank focuses on non-bank financial sector. That means the stock exchanges and the other markets, the derivative instruments, the asset managers, and the collective investment funds, which people have come to recognize need to play a bigger part in the European financial sector. The securities market-focused files covered a broad range of areas in the Irish presidency. Three examples of small but important files are the transparency directive, the PRIPS regulation, and the central securities depository regulation. The transparency directive aims to increase the level of detail being provided by companies to investors and to society as a whole. This directive sets minimum requirements for the disclosure of periodic and ongoing information by issuers of securities and on the disclosure of major shareholdings and voting rights. The agreement of this directive was the one occasion, I think the only occasion, when the Irish presidency was noticed by rock stars, even if one of the somewhat older and more reflective rock stars. I refer to the fact that Bono commented on the successful completion of the transparency directive, and I quote, I have huge respect for all those who have worked relentlessly to seal this deal that will help fight poverty, hunger, and injustice the world over. Hats off and glasses raised to the Irish presidency and the European Parliament for getting it over the finish line. What drew his support was the provision in the transparency directive requiring extractive and mining companies to publicly disclose their links to governments. It was a reminder to our team, if they needed it, of the worldwide importance of even the most technical of our presidency work. Another file that will impact the person in the street is the packaged retail investment products regulation. The regulation requires the provision of a standard key information document to retail investors. Whether the PRIPS as it's called proposal improves the quality of the information available in practice to consumers, it's too early to say. What is interesting about PRIPS is that it covers both investment funds and life insurance products. To the casual observer, that might seem unremarkable. An investment fund and life policies are obviously similar medium and long-term investment products. However, throughout the history of the EU, they have been regulated entirely separately. The PRIPS proposal bridges the chasm in consumer protection. And for that reason alone, it's a very welcome development. If I turn to the central securities depository regulation, this was a file we had high hopes for. Ultimately, we didn't conclude it during our presidency. This for us is the one that got away. Although at one stage, it looked like it was going to be the only securities dossier that we got across the line. Unfortunately, despite the backing of the ECB, we failed to reach agreement within council, proving that negotiations in Europe are never straightforward. The aim of this regulation was to strengthen the process of settling the purchase of securities such as equities and bonds within the union. Again, this was in response to the crisis, which has shown weaknesses in the settlement system. This was to be improved by defining harmonized settlement periods and rules across Europe. If it works, CSD, Central Securities Depositories, would hold definitive records for all dematerialized financial instruments. This will rationalize the many national legal setups and provide a common template for supervision, risk management, and governance. We progressed the file quite significantly, solving issues such as dematerialization of share certificates and finding a solution as to how CSDs would be able to provide banking services. But we could not quite push it across the line. The most difficult underlying issue was how to reconcile the different legal systems across the union, in particular the different company law arrangements. In my view, the CSDR will have to progress with a provisional solution to that thorny question, one such as we outlined in our compromise text of the 6th of June. But reviewing CSDR provides me with an opportunity to also observe that one of the most ambitious directives of the next few years will be the securities law directive, which it is intended will definitively solve this problem, bridging, if it's a success, the divide between the common law and the Napoleonic Code jurisdictions with regard to what it means to own, buy, and sell a security. While this sounds like a technical issue, those of you who are seasoned observers of the EU will know that one of the most entrenched cultural and technical sources of difference among EU countries are these two different ways of looking at the law. The presidency, which has to finalize the securities law directive, and it won't be us, but it will be an interesting presidency to watch. It will be quite a challenge. If I turn now to the two largest securities markets files, these were the market abuse directive and regulation, as we call it, mad mar, and the markets and financial instruments directive and regulation, as we call it, Mifid Mifir. Mad Mar illustrates the challenges when different proposals get interconnected and provides a good example of the use of discretions to get agreement. Noting that fact allows me to discuss whether the reliance on discretions is a good outcome. Mifid Mifir illustrates the influence of the negotiation dynamics themselves, and I'll talk a little bit about that in a moment. I should take this opportunity to explain that one thing that has become quite apparent in financial services legislation at EU level is the move towards the use of regulations as the primary legislative tool. This reflects a focused aspiration from an EU policy perspective to have in as much as possible maximum harmonization of legislation and a single rule book. This seems particularly the case where legislation has previously been the subject of minimum harmonization at EU level, such as Mifir and Marc. Both pieces of legislation aren't in the main directly applicable with only a few provisions that will require enabling legislation at member state level. They are, however, both accompanied by supplemental and complementary directives where the effectiveness of the provisions contained therein is dependent on effective transposition in international legal systems, thus arguably deploying both approaches, the directive and the regulation, to best effect. In its Mad Mar proposal, the commission set out to augment the existing market abuse regime to increase the powers and sanctions available to regulators and to broaden the scope of application across the spectrum of financial instruments and trading venues, including in particular commodity and related derivatives markets. It included a regulation and a proposed directive on criminal sanctions for market abuse. The latter, interestingly, is the first piece of legislation proposed by the commission in reliance on article 83.2 of the treaty, an article which gives the union a regulatory criminal law competence. The council general approach was agreed on Mar at the end of the Cypriot presidency and was a major success for them. Under the Irish presidency, we achieved agreement with the parliament on the market abuse regulations. We had to leave the finalization of the market abuse directive to the next presidency. Without going through the chronology of the negotiations, my first point is to note that despite the view of many that Mar could not be completed until Mifed was first completed, our team saw the possibility of achieving an agreement on Mar in parallel while ring fencing certain parts of the regulation to be updated once Mifed was completed. This strategy worked and the presidency was able to decouple Mad Mar from Mifed and ensure that one did not become a bargaining chip in relation to the other. This allowed both dossiers to be brought across the line. However, this was not achieved without difficulty. The most significant issues were, firstly, the harmonization of the types and levels of administrative sanction and the appropriate powers for the competent authority. It's worth my spending a little time on these to illustrate the kinds of compromises that a presidency must be willing to accept in order to achieve the greater benefit of getting the regulatory reform package through. The Mar text now sets minimum levels to apply in all member states for the maximum administrative pecuniary fines. These are 5 million for natural persons and 15 million or 15% of annual turnover for legal persons. The maximum fine for legal persons was a critical issue for parliament and it was increased by 5 million and 5% on the fine originally agreed in council general approach, i.e. from 10 to 15% and from 10 to 15 million. Other administrative sanctions of note include the discouragement of profits made or losses avoided and a permanent ban from exercising management functions in investment firms in the case of repeated market abuse or insider manipulation, insider trading. This article in the regulations on sanctions is a good example of how difficult it was to reach agreement between the co-legislators. Its drafting now seems more like that of a directive text requiring subsequent transposition rather than a regulation text applying directly. There are repeated references to national law and the adoption of a minimum harmonization approach to the level of pecuniary fees. Certain member states face difficulties, understandable difficulties with the level of sanctions being set because they were being set at a level that they would be deemed criminal in effect and not administrative in their jurisdictions. The compromise that we came to was that the level of the minimum fine has been raised but the apparent discretion of member states has been broadened. Much of the debate centered around the issue of whether market abuse should be an administrative or a criminal matter. Because market abuse is so difficult to investigate, it has a counter-intuitive feature which was at the core of the debates. Although it seems more draconian to introduce a criminal sanctions regime, doing so raises the standard of proof required. Raising the required standard of proof paradoxically increases the legal protection for insider dealers and market manipulators. Part of the compromise to get the mad mar package across the line is that within 24 months of mar coming into force, member states may choose to put criminal sanctions in place. We had to accept that this step back from the mandatory imposition of administrative sanctions for every breach, as was proposed by the commission, was a necessary compromise. Critical to combating market abuse is the likelihood of detection and successful prosecution. The intensity of the penalty is secondary. Criminology studies place considerable emphasis on the impact of a credible threat of detection and enforcement rather than the potential levels of sanction available under statute. Perhaps politically it can be attractive to impose heavy penalties, but if the price of that is to place obstacles in the way regulators trying to get at the facts and put a case together, this would seem to me to be the wrong outcome. It is the retention of this perhaps populist, but I think less effective option as a discretion for member states, which leaves me with a bit of disquiet. I am happy to admit. And I'm left hoping that member states will think long and hard before going down that route. Let me mention another example of compromise. Failure to cooperate or to comply with an inspection investigation or request by a competent authority is also subject to sanctions. But what those sanctions are is not specified in Article 26 of the MAR. They are the subject of another member state discretion in transposition. Once again, I hope is that member states will not exercise their discursions in ways which will make it as hard to penalize non-corporation as to penalize the matter being investigated. That would be counterproductive. Consider an example, a person trades. The trade is the kind of trade you would do if you have inside information. How do I show that you had it? The nature of market abuse is such that for many years regulators have been at a considerable disadvantage by being unable to prove the person connection between the inside information and the person who conducted the trade. Telephone records are often the key. The agreements reached in both MAR and MIFFIT improve the legislation in this area. Firms will now be required to record telephone landlines under MIFFIT. The MAR text grants the power of competent authorities to request existing telephone records from investment firms, credit institutions, and other financial institutions and telecommunications operators significantly. This is a good outcome. In the past, I've come across some resistance to giving market abuse investigators this kind of access. It seems to some a power which should be reserved to the police. This view has been, in my view, misguided. In summary then, the final text of the market abuse regulation reflects our willingness to give discretions back to member states to get the package across the line. My suspicion is that those discretions will not be used to step back from the original market abuse directive. I hope and believe member states will not actually take that step backwards. On the contrary, I think they will take the opportunity to strengthen their market abuse investigative framework. But part of our approach has been willing to push matters forward by leaving those decisions with the member states. The other major file was Miffit Miffir. Miffit is the cornerstone of non-banking, non-insurance financial regulation in Europe. Its scope is broad from how an intermediary conducts its business with a retail client to how competent authorities can intervene to manage positions built up in commodity derivative contracts, for example. The first Miffit was negotiated under the Irish presidency back in 2004. So we are back on familiar territory. It came into effect in 2007. The new directive and regulation include a number of changes to European securities market regulation that were required under G20 commitments and are being replicated across the world. More generally, Miffit II responds to some of the unintended consequences of Miffit I. It seeks to deal with the emergence of high-frequency trading and to respond to a perceived need to improve oversight of less regulated markets. Introducing a new regulatory framework, the OTF, or organized trading facility regime, to regulate trading previously done off-market and also to introduce a harmonized third country regime and new consumer protection rules. Prior to the start of our presidency, we identified three key issues within this complex file that we thought would decide the matter. These were all issues that large member state had issues with and were on opposite sides to one another about. The three issues were all technical and I won't go into the detail here today. As I stated earlier, what I want to focus on is the process of negotiation. We saw earlier that with large member states on different sides of a number, we saw early on, I should say, that with large member states on different sides on a number of nuanced issues, finding a compromise on Miffit was always going to be difficult. The situation was very similar to the negotiations on Miffit I when, as is well known, the UK and France were on opposite sides of the debate relating to the structure of European financial markets. One side places the highest value on inter-venue competition. The other side values most the quality of the market price formation process. What was perhaps different this time was that in addition to those long-standing differences of perspective, Germany on this occasion had significant concerns on one major issue, clearing and access, where it wanted to ensure that we had got the balance right between protecting liquidity and promoting competition. Throughout the six months of our presidency, we had numerous calls with capitals to discuss their concerns and outline our rationale for our compromise proposals. It helped quite significantly to have visited the six largest member states capitals in the first two weeks of January, as it allowed us to form relationships and to get to know the face at the end of the line. One thing that became clear was that countries were seeing Miffit as a package although many of the issues were in principle capable of being discussed and decided discreetly. This meant we could not progress issues one by one to an agreed position, and this was a feature of other files during our presidency also. Ultimately, we decided the way forward was to put both the relevant countries into a room, work through a diligent of sometimes painstaking line by line negotiation, and the end result was a text that both sides could live with. Towards the end of our presidency, we use this tactic more frequently by holding bi- or multilateral meetings with member states. This allowed for more flexible discussions than in council. It also helped at times to have another large member state in the room that had achieved what they wanted in the file and didn't wish for another issue to result in the loss of their gain but had no significant interest in the issue the other two members were focused on. This promoted compromise. As in all negotiations, the final stage of the myth was the most intensive. At a certain point, the presidency felt we had reached agreement on some key points. For example, an issue we felt had been closed the introduction of a new trading venue, the OTF, came to the fore again with one member state reopening concerns over the inclusion of equities within the category and another coming out in response on exactly the opposite side. This resulted, this particular event resulted in our team being given 24 hours by the Irish ambassador to reach a deal between the two countries on the issue. We did calls to both capitals late night drafting working with the key attaches in a room in an open-ended session in an effort to find common ground between both sides. At that point, the relationship the teams had fostered with the attaches that the previous calls with capitals and negotiation skills and expertise the team had built up all played a part. And the result was achievement of a general approach in myth. This experience and process was replicated in many of the other files and is a significant part of the reason the Irish presidency was successful. Let me take a step back then from the individual dossiers and say something about what is involved in running a presidency. It's clear to me in retrospect that there are a number of key issues particularly for small countries when running a presidency. First question I would pose, see who says posed by running a presidency is the question of what resources to place in Brussels and what resources to keep at home in your own capital. Secondly, how to balance and mutually organize the mixture of technical advisors from regulators and central banks on the one hand with civil servants from the responsible department on the other. Both on the floor of the council working group or the trial log meetings and back home in the extensive preparatory work that has to be done. Then there is the question of the use to be made of non-papers in the face of substantial uncertainty about the detail of technical matters that are not always well understood within council. When to deploy visits to capital phone calls and bilateral meetings, this can be a key issue as I've discussed above. When to drive forward a preferred solution and when to see the process of one of mediating between different perspectives and power blocks. I think at times we drove towards a conclusion too forcefully for example in relation to CSDR. At times we could have pushed more forcefully but actually at a lot of times I think we got the balance about right. Another issue is how to link unconnected dossiers or issues and when to delink connected dossiers or disconnect issues being treated by member states as a package. I mentioned above how we manage the linkages between Mad Mar and Miffet Miffir. I mentioned also the linkages between CSDR and the forthcoming securities law directive. Two other sets of dossiers were close links with the BRD with the deposit guarantee directive and the transparency directive with the company law accounting directive by the way another directive agreed under the Irish presidency. Another question is how to use lobbyists and industry sources as a resource without getting caught up in their perspective. How much to place on the agenda of the trial log meetings themselves and what to deal with through the technical meetings which prepare the way for trial logs is often a critical point. How to treat offers of support particularly sick on these from industry sources or from other larger member states can have an important impact on your reputation. How to prioritize dossiers and how to deal with the commission's priorities which are not always the same as those of the council presidency. We focused on files with what I think is an almost ruthless prioritization. The focus was on files that the department judged we could deliver and the energy and resources were put into those. I give a lot of credit to our department of finance colleagues for understanding how important this point was and having a definite vision of where they wanted to get to. In fact, if you go on the website and look at the priorities list that was published at the start of the presidency by the Irish presidency, it reads almost identical with the list of successes achieved at the end. And that says a lot. It was also important to know when to go to Korraper and when to go to Ecovin. For example, the Irish presidency had a significant number of Ecovin meetings. I think it was seven versus the usual three to four. This was highlighted in the BRD debate where an extra Ecovin was arranged to reach an agreement on the file in the dying days of our presidency. How you answer these questions, of course, is not sufficient to achieve success if you don't have a committed and effective team. Commitment of our team was a key part of the successful outcome. For example, within the central bank, the six people in my division who were working on this flew to Brussels and other capitals 63 times during the six months and stayed in Brussels hotels for about 80 nights during the six month period. These numbers were similar for our counterparts elsewhere in the central bank and in the Department of Finance. The mixture of our teams was important, consisting of people with significant private sector experience and those with significant public sector experience. This allowed issues to be examined from different perspectives internally before finalizing strategies and defending decisions before the commissioned parliament or other member states. The experience of the central bank staff working in the European supervisory authorities such as ESMA and the EBA was also very helpful. Not only had these people experience in negotiations and meetings in the European environment and of the European legislative process, they also had contacts built up in other authorities and with the commission that were useful during the presidency. This added to the credibility of the teams and made the negotiation process a little easier. Our involvement during the presidency has now in turn increased our profile and would add to the stature and the skill of the people we have working with the ESCB, with the EBA, ESMA and EOPPA. In our case, we also had the advantage of being native English speakers. This advantage provides the ability to draft changes very quickly and accurately. Our experience from previous presidencies was useful. I think we are seen as a mature small member state that has a long track record within the European Union. Members of the central bank staff who had worked in previous presidencies or otherwise worked within the Brussels machinery played a key role on some of the dossiers. Ireland, I suspect, is also seen as an honest broker within Europe. In particular, we are seen as an informed source on the economic realities underpinning the UK's European policy. This allows us to be able to resolve differences between the UK and others within Europe. It's helped in a number of files, in particular in the MIFFIT file where the outstanding issues had the UK on one side and to some extent Germany and France on the other. These differences often reflect differences in the structure of their respective financial sectors that we were well placed to understand. Commentators have stated that the presidency suited Irish sensibilities and abilities. It is suggested by some that it enabled us to show our consensus-building skills, our talent for people on board, and our natural social and collegial affinities. I've also heard it argued that it marked our return to the European stage, allowing us to remind other countries of these skills which had fallen somewhat into disuse in the period of the Celtic Tiger and the firefighting period which has followed. Well, perhaps I'm a bit reluctant, I think, to be so self-congratulatory. I think circumstances played to our advantage. I do think we played our cards well. I think we also got a little lucky on a few occasions. Therefore, I hesitate to draw any conclusions about our sort of a putative Irish character or the unique capacities of the Irish public service. Perhaps the most positive message from our presidency comes not from thinking of ourselves as different, but by seeing ourselves as representative of the norm. The Irish presidency has gone some way towards restoring faith here in our capacity to participate effectively in Europe. But Ireland's relative success has also countered concerns elsewhere about how well the rotating presidency can work in the post-Lisbon EU co-decision-based consensus-focused legislative process. The presidency has now been handed over to the Lithuanians, and it will be a presidency of firsts. They are first Baltic state, the first former Soviet Republic to hold the presidency of the council. For them, as for any small country, it is a challenge to run the presidency. It certainly seems to me far too early to say that the rotating presidency does not work anymore. I will acknowledge that there are strong motivations for small states not to invest in the presidency or push hard for success. But there is more to the matter than that. And it seems to me that we should resist concluding that the rotating presidency does not work unless we are irremediably forced to such a conclusion. And the Irish presidency, to my mind, counts against that conclusion. Thank you.