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

Mr. Fitzgerald, not just ... your ... as you said, I think, or it's a fact anyhow, that EBS turned to property and development loans to achieve growth and profits and that this was a characteristic of all the financial institutions in the bubble, some, to what has been referred to, as an excessive degree - what one of the witnesses here, Mr. Black, a regulator ... a former regulator from the United States, called "crazy growth". Would a person of your experience and your firm's experience, notwithstanding the narrowness of the parameters of audit as you see it, would that not have set alarms bell ringing in, say, 2005, 2006, as the bubble expanded?