Professor John FitzGerald:

I think there was a degree of hubris that pervaded Ireland. As a result of knowing the Senator would raise the issue of the 1999 medium term review, even going back to then and in each medium term review onwards, we raised this issue until it was too late in 2008 when the damage was done, that there was a need to use fiscal policy in a different way. In terms of the economics literature, the use of fiscal policy to manage the cycle had gone out of fashion, as the Senator is probably aware, saying fine tuning is not possible. This is not fine tuning, this is stopping disaster by using fiscal policy differently. Hopefully we have learned our lesson. It is something which need not have happened but did happen.