Ms Marie Hunt:

In my submission I mentioned how important sentiment was. We were not selling houses, but our reaction to "Future Shock" was as strong as it was because the tenor of the programme was based on a number of "What if?" hypothetical scenarios. We had already acknowledged in our reports that transactional activity had started to slow down, that development volumes were slowing down and that we were moving into the downward phase of the cycle, but we felt it was irresponsible to scaremonger, for want of a better word, by putting forth hypothetical scenarios.

Three individual scenarios were posited on the RTE programme. One was that Ireland was going to see a complete collapse of foreign direct investment, with no further multinational investment and many of the existing multinationals leaving. We were very active in that space - it was a core part of our business - and did not see that scenario playing out and it did not happen. The second scenario was that we were going to have a major collapse of construction activity in the economy. That did happen, but it happened as an outcome of the downturn that occurred; it was not the reason house prices fell. The third scenario was that there would be a very significant increase in interest rates. While I would say the "Future Shock" programme was right in that it predicted there would be a crash, it did not predict there would be a global financial crisis which would lead to a crash.