Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Thursday, 26 March 2015
Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis
Context Phase
Mr. Ed Mulhall:
There are two answers to that. I am sorry to cut into the Deputy's time, I do not want to get him into trouble, but I need to take a little time to answer the question. I would quibble with the classification that Dr. Mercille uses. I had a researcher go through the "Prime Time" programming from that period. It is vastly more coverage than Dr. Mercille says it is. I gave the committee the figure of 120 programmes related to the inquiry, of which a third - 40 programmes - related to property alone over that period of time. I am not disputing with him, but if one looks at Dr. Mercille's analysis, and the Chair showed the analysis in terms of newspapers, Dr. Mercille is doing a word search for the newspapers. He is only allowing for the word "bubble" and not allowing for the word "boom" and that affects the issues around the numbers.
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