Mr. Tom O'Connell:

It was unavoidable in my view from around that point. And if I can go back to ... house prices were 12 times average incomes. In fact, I remember at that time, I said that to a Dáil committee, an Oireachtas committee. At that time The Financial Times, funnily enough, had a report by the Bank of England that house prices were seven times incomes in the UK, and the Bank of England said it was extremely worried about that. So, Irish house prices had to fall by about half, clearly. Or if you look at the ratio between house prices to incomes ... the dominator incomes, I mean if we had good times, per capita incomes in real times might increase by 3% and 4% a year. So there was no way you were going to get that ratio down to four, five, six without a massive crash in property prices, so it was inevitable. And in fact the Government itself, by its action in calling for the Bacon reports, as early as 1999, was clearly concerned about what happened. But, subsequently, post I think the budget in 2002, tweaked things a little bit, after that house prices really took off.