Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party) | Oireachtas source

Mr. Gleeson, arguably the first speculative bubble and crash was what became known as tulip mania in Holland in 1637. Jan Brueghel the Younger has a fascinating painting about it. The impression is being given that what happened in Ireland in the crash was, you said a 100 year event. But in 1999, three years before you became deputy governor, Oxford University Press published a paper by a man called Peter Englund, Stockholm School of Economics. He wrote about a study that was done by a colleague of his, published the year before, a study of 30 major bank crises, not from 100 years ago, but from the 1980s, including three of the most advanced industrial countries in the world, namely, Norway, Finland and Sweden. The common patterns that he outlines are in paragraph 2: deregulation, overly rapid credit expansion, sustained increase in asset prices, a bubble, the bubble bursting, collapse of asset prices accompanied by non-performing loans, acute banking crises, credit crunch, government salvage banks.

Will you agree with me that that would be, or not, an uncanny synopsis of the bubble and crash in Ireland? But this was from 1999, which-----