Mr. Gerry O'Regan:

I think retrospectively that some of our contributors were of the view that it was a good time to buy property at a particular point in time over those years. It would be the same as asking someone today if he or she thought house prices will go up or down in Dublin and whether one should buy now or wait for a year. He or she could be right or wrong. The essential point I am making is that we were trying to cover all possibilities and going back to my other assumption, which was that I was trying to sell the newspaper. For example, I recruited David McWilliams with that express purpose in mind. On 22 March 2006 when I had been in the job three or four months, we put across the top of page 1 of the Irish Independentthat David McWilliams was writing inside about Ireland's love affair with borrowing, saying our economy could turn from a crock of gold to a complete crock unless we checked this credit craze. He wrote "If the property boom goes pear shaped - and they tend to do so - not only will our feelings of prosperity evaporate, our European credentials might go too". On 26 April, he wrote that our economy's over reliance on the construction sector would expose us to a hard landing if there was a slump, stating "much of [our] employment is coming from the construction sector. In fact, take construction and its attendant industries out of the equation and there is not much vibrancy [t]here". He asked if people would ask if they did not see a slump coming, that is, an end to this artificial boosting of the economy.