Mr. Gerry O'Regan:

The actual inclination of people to want to get on the property ladder has always been there, for a number of decades.

It has not gone away and is still there. What I was conscious of particularly when I started editing the Irish Independentwas to try to broaden its overall economic coverage. I was appointed editor on 28 September 2005 and within a few weeks I met a man for lunch whose name has already come up repeatedly here at the committee meetings, Mr. David McWilliams. I signed him up to write for the Irish Independentwhen I was ten weeks into the job. He joined on 22 December, we both went off and enjoyed our Christmases and he started to write everything that he saw fit from early in 2006. I have a number of key extracts here where his prognostications of the doom which was to come have been proved very much correct by what happened.

I recruited David McWilliams for two reasons, one of which was as part of an ongoing process to widen our economics coverage. We had an excellent economics editor in Brendan Keenan. I have an interesting aside to which I can speak later which was Brendan's response to that other man who has been repeatedly mentioned in relation to the downturn, Morgan Kelly. That and a number of other key extracts show that the Irish Independentwas willing and trying to embrace what was now a widening discussion about possible perils on the horizon. The records in the Irish Independentat that time prove that was the case.