Mr. David Doyle:

Well, that was Morgan Kelly's conclusion, that the Government hadn't caused the problem and the Government couldn't do anything about the collapse. Whether that's true or not, I mean, he did say that. You could debate parts of that. But all I was making the point that the budgetary position was so strong, if the Government wanted to make an intervention to drive prices down or to drive property output down, which wouldn't have been all that easy to do because everyone was building all over the place, there was the financial scope there, apparently, only on the face of the numbers.

The underlying position was that given the obsessive level of building that had been going on, the real revenue flow was underneath that, were... weren't lasting, that was clearly known. I can recall myself pointing out at the end of 2006 to my colleagues and to political people that the very figure that you spoke about, the 25% of output there on the construction side, that it was unreal and that it would come down and that we were going to be facing tremendous pressures. What we didn't factor in was the international recession which drove out but down internationally about 8%, including in America, England, our main markets. That impacted on us. It didn't factor in the financial crash either and it didn't factor in the collapse in building. It didn't factor in the unsustainability of the reality behind the banks' explosive increase in lending.