During his 45-minute press briefing the Minister for Finance, Mr McCreevy, made it clear that his admission that he had "got it wrong" related only to his failure to anticipate the public reaction and the subsequent political damage to the Government and distress caused to the O'Flaherty family. He was not saying the decision itself was wrong.
He made this distinction when asked when he realised the decision to nominate Mr Hugh O'Flaherty was wrong. "I never said to this day . . . I think he is a suitably qualified person. I think as I said in the Dail that Mr O'Flaherty was a suitably qualified person. I think he was deserving of a second chance after 1999, and I still think that.
"But what I said for the record is that on top of all the furore that ensued on account of the problems involved for the Government, the problems involved for Mr O'Flaherty, the problems involved for the European Investment Bank, definitely if I had known all that before his nomination I wouldn't have done it."
He agreed that he and the Government had been politically damaged by the controversy. Asked to assess the extent of the damage to the Government, he said: "It's impossible to assess that particular question until a general election comes about.
"I'm sure the Government in the short term has suffered some damage, but what the longer-term impact of it is I just don't know. Whether it will still be an issue at the time of the next general election or not is a matter of opinion."
Asked again later whether the issue would now go away, he said: " Who can make predictions as to what are going to be issues in the next general election. I just don't know is the answer."
Asked if it had damaged him politically, he said: "Well, certainly I won't be advertising it on my c.v. Of course it has. The honest answer to that is, of course it has."
He said he accepted responsibility for bringing the controversy about and for not foreseeing it, but said none of his fellow Ministers had anticipated it either. "It would only be fair to say - and I think Mary O'Rourke said it best of all over the past number of months - that none of us would have anticipated the furore that came about after.
"Certainly the reason I discussed it with my Cabinet colleagues was on account of the events of 1999 and the expectation that at least there would be some controversy, but to ensure that all were on board for the decision and we all were happy about it. They all said they thought is was a very, very humane thing to do.
"None of them anticipated it either. So I accept the blame as the person with primary responsibility, and I'm responsible for doing it, but none of them anticipated it and I don't think anybody could.
"And actually there are some politicians who made a cause celebre of this particular issue, who actually thought it was a great idea the day he was nominated . . . I'm talking about a number of politicians of my own party and of the Opposition parties as well and some journalists as well. However, the issue moved on."
Asked did he think he got it wrong, he said: "Yes." Asked if, knowing what he knows now, he would have nominated Mr O'Flaherty, he said: "If you wind the clock back, you wouldn't do a lot of things in life, but if you wind the clock back knowing what has happened in the past few months to everybody . . . no, and I'm sure Mr O'Flaherty would say he is sorry that he accepted the invitation in the first instance."
Asked if he understood why there had been a public outcry, he said many reasons had been put forward "ranging from the financial scandals - which certainly Mr O'Flaherty doesn't have anything to do with at all - and Mr Haughey, Mr Lowry, all these things to do with planning, cronyism, the Ryan family, everything else, so there is a wide variety of things that people got upset about."
In response to a series of questions on the subject, Mr McCreevy insisted that the idea of nominating Mr O'Flaherty came from him and him alone. He specifically denied it had come from the Taoiseach, or that Mr O'Flaherty had sought it, or that there had been any promise of a job to Mr O'Flaherty when he resigned as a Supreme Court judge last year at the height of the Sheedy controversy.
He said: "First of all, I don't know Hugh O'Flaherty, either on a business basis or a personal basis or anything else. I'd say I might have run into the man on maybe three or four occasions in my lifetime, so he is not a personal friend of mine.
"I can tell everybody that Hugh O'Flaherty didn't look for this job, or any other job as far as I'm aware. This job was offered to Mr O'Flaherty by me on behalf of the Government. Certainly there was no linkage between any of the events of 1999 and the offer of this particular post to Hugh O'Flaherty."
Asked specifically was it his idea to offer the job, he first said: "Well let's put it like this. An awful lot of people since 1999, since the Sheedy affair and the resignation of Mr O'Flaherty, would have felt that Mr O'Flaherty paid a particularly heavy price for what the Chief Justice described at the time as actions motivated on a humanitarian basis.
"Certainly an awful lot of people, both politicians and ordinary people, and may I say some leading journalists, would have said in the course of conversation: `Wasn't Hugh O'Flaherty very hard done by?'
"I think that the Taoiseach and others have said that Mr O'Flaherty was in the running to be Chief Justice of the country. That's on a par of status with the President of the country and the Taoiseach of the country, and Mr O'Flaherty was denied that opportunity on account of the events of 1999.
"I thought Mr O'Flaherty would be a suitable candidate for Ireland to put forward to this European job. I discussed this with the Taoiseach and the Tanaiste initially, we talked about it. We had some, we hadn't a big debate about it, but we discussed that he was a very suitable person. After that I decided to have discussions with my Cabinet colleagues as well."
Asked again was it he who had initiated the selection of Mr O'Flaherty or had the Taoiseach done so, he said: "It was me who initiated the selection of Mr O'Flaherty." Asked was there any prompting, or whispering from anyone else, he said: "There was no prompting from anyone else, no whispering, no smoke-filled rooms, no anything."
Asked had he first introduced Mr O'Flaherty's name he said: "Yes".
Asked if he understood the difficulty journalists had in believing he had initiated the nomination alone, given that he didn't know him, he said: "Yes . . . The answer is I can readily understand it, because that's what Ireland is like.
"The one thing about this that no one can understand is how he got the job in the first place. Sure it's Ireland, it must have been lobbying, it must have been part of something. It wasn't. It wasn't part of any deal. It wasn't part of anything else. I just nominated him for reasons I have outlined here today, I outlined the same reasons in the Dail and many other places."
Asked if the controversy would put any pressure on him in relation to producing the next budget, he said: "Maybe people might feel that, but it doesn't make any difference to me at all. I'll produce the same budget. When I produce the budget in December Hugh O'Flaherty will not be in my mind at all. If you look at the three budgets I have produced so far, I produced those budgets in my own way."
He said on several occasions that he believed he could have persuaded his fellow EU finance ministers to appoint Mr O'Flaherty had the former judge not chosen to withdraw his name last week. However, on the final occasion he was asked this, he said that nobody could now say what the final outcome would have been.
"I somehow suspect that most of my ministerial colleagues in Europe don't even know that this was an issue, because it was being dealt with at a civil service level, at the director level. But definitely it was an issue for the European Investment Bank as an institution. And from what I have gathered over the past month from briefings they have given to the Irish media, that they had a particular view about it.
"But the directors would have to report to their ministerial colleagues and ministers are on holidays during August and it hadn't progressed much further. But the decision to withdraw the name was Mr O'Flaherty's . . . well, I withdrew his name at the request of Mr O'Flaherty, who had come to the conclusion himself that he had suffered enough."
He repeated several times in response to further questions that he believed he would have persuaded his EU ministerial colleagues to agree to give the job to Mr O'Flaherty. In answer to the final question on the matter, he said: "Who knows?"
Asked was the Irish director of the EIB - second secretary of the Department of Finance, Mr Noel O'Gorman - picking up signals of opposition to Mr O'Flaherty, he said: "No, because all of the board's directors are people like Mr O'Gorman [civil servants]. Civil servants, when there is an issue of doubt, would report back to their ministers and look for a direction.
"I'm sure some countries were fine. I assume some countries were awaiting direction from their ministers, and I'm sure the ministers like me were out on holidays for the month of August."
Asked was he disappointed that there were only six replies received in relation to the O'Flaherty nomination, he said: "I haven't any details of that . . . A number of them had replied in the affirmative as far as I am aware. I'm sure that will come out in time. But I'd say most of the directors were awaiting agreement from the minister bosses."
He said he was particularly sorry about the distress he had caused to the O'Flaherty family. "What I do feel very, very sorry about is what happened to Mr O'Flaherty, his wife and family over the past few months, which can be directly attributed to me."
By offering him the job, Mr McCreevy said, "I brought an awful lot of trouble on Mr O'Flaherty and his wife and family."