Mr. Pat McArdle:

We will always have contrarians, first of all. There always have been, there always will. Nobody's listening to the contrarians now, as I pointed out earlier, to the IFAC people, for example. Nobody listened, by the way, to Morgan Kelly's other six warnings which turned out to be wrong and ... very aesthetic and condemned them very strongly, if I remember correctly. So that's the first point, you'll always have contrarians. I quote you then in my witness statement at page 8, where I quote Professor Honohan to a Dáil committee in June 2010, where he said, "regulators should always pay attention to [contrarians] with coherent but not necessarily right views". He went on to say "Contrarians are nearly always wrong but it is the "nearly" that matters". So, here you're operating on a very small probability - it's the nearly that matters - and more attention was not paid to those two studies, you say, because warnings like that are nearly always wrong, in the words of Professor Honohan. I accept that it looks different now when you look back, but I would suggest to you, Deputy, that you got to put yourself in the mindframe that existed at the time.

The other thing I'd say, as regards your quote from the IMF, when it counted and where it mattered, the IMF said there'd be soft landing here. There's a rake of papers from the IMF every second week. They're not actually ... they're by individuals ... under the signatures of individual ... not the IMF imprimatur. So when it mattered here, the IMF and the OECD and the Central Bank said, "There will be a soft landing". They discounted that paper that you referred to. And I could quote you other examples, by the way, from other studies that came to different conclusions. There were, you know ... there were quite a number of other studies there too, given the ... and, indeed, I also say in my witness statement, the Central Bank reran Professor Kelly's analysis and data and they came to a totally different conclusion. So who are we to believe the Central Bank, with all their expertise and resources, or this one guy who had never been in this field and suddenly moved into it?