Mr. Tom Parlon:

Well, I suppose the year before I took over the job, 2006 had been the peak and immediately in 2007 there were some concerns. I referred earlier to ... you know, interest rates had gone up a number of times. The Irish economy had started to falter a little bit, there were some international issues that caused less of ... and the sentiment that had been there. The mad sentiment where everybody just wanted to buy property and extra property had disappeared.

So there was no question about it. House building decreased substantially from the peak in 2007 and when I started in 2008, you know, there were issues ... there had been a budget brought in. The national development plan, which was the other side of the story ... I think there was €18 billion there over a couple of years and that was deemed to take up the slack ... if there was a reduction on house building, the national development plan was going to take up the slack. And, unfortunately, each year after that as Government finances deteriorated, the national development plan got slashed as well so we ended up with a situation where the industry ended up one fifth the size it was in about seven years, which was a massive collapse. And I felt I and the organisation were fire-fighting a lot of the time to try and protect ... to stall the slow down, try and ... you know, and there's times when I look back at some of the stuff I did and I'm embarrassed saying that we ... we've hit the bottom in 2008 and it's a good time to start buying again and houses were never so affordable. That's what I believed at the time but there was a new bottom found the next year, unfortunately, and so on, and, you know, we got into a major decline. The construction ... Minister Mr. Lenihan, the late Mr. Lenihan, opened a conference for us and he was widely publicised. We were hosting the international construction conference for Europe in Dublin Castle and he said he had the pleasure or otherwise in taking over as Minister of Finance when the construction industry had come to a shuddering halt and that was, unfortunately, matched by a fairly substantial credit crisis as well. So I found ... my first number of years there fire-fighting to try and stall the decline that was happening in the industry.