Professor John FitzGerald:

My concern was that I felt that by the end, we were campaigning on this issue and were in danger of losing credibility. There was a very good article by Professor Morgan Kelly published in The Irish Timesbetween 25 and 31 December 2006 on the housing market dangers. I contacted him, told him that I felt we were considered to be cranks on the issue and that it was great to have another academic coming out and saying there was a danger and asked whether he would submit an article to the quarterly economic commentary, which he did. It was refereed and published in June 2007. I felt we were isolated and that people were not listening. People just did not want to know. There was an interesting interchange between my father, Garret FitzGerald, and Richard Bruton on the election results programme after the 2007 election. If my memory serves me right, my father, who was very concerned about the state of the economy and competitiveness, asked Richard Bruton why Fine Gael did not campaign on the dangers to the economy and the reply was that Fine Gael had used focus groups and people did not want to know. My father wrote an article in June 2007 on that issue.