Professor John FitzGerald:

That article was excellent. It was so good that I got on to Professor Morgan Kelly and asked him to say it again in an article for the quarterly economic commentary, and he did. I asked him to do so because his article was repeating what we had said in the medium-term review in December 2005 where we looked at a fall in house prices of one third which would give rise to unemployment rising above 11%. Since 2005 and up to the end of 2006, house prices continued to rise so I felt it was sensible. It was great the he was coming out and somebody else was making the running on this. I said to him that I would like him to submit an article. He did so and we published his article with which I totally agreed.

In the spring 2007 quarterly economic commentary, my colleagues talked about the risks to the financial sector, so we got it right. What is interesting, under FOI, and this may come up later - is it in Nyberg or under FOI - is the reaction of the Department of Finance; they saw it and they rewrote it for the Minister, saying the ESRI expected a soft landing where we said there could be a soft landing. There could have been but we were uncertain because one cannot know the future. The mistake was 2008 for six weeks.