Mr. Tom Considine:

Well, Chairman ... or, sorry, Deputy, the ... in my opening statement I refer there to an exercise that the ESRI did in December 2005 in their 2005 to 2012 medium-term review, and in that there is a table which shows all these previous crashes. And they modelled at the time a crash of a third in the Irish housing market. The problem is that the results of it, it ... even if it happened, and it wasn't expected, it wasn't a forecast, it was a modelling exercise, even if it happened it didn't seem to threaten the stability of the Irish financial system. And the reason for that was that there seemed to be so many buffers in the system: we had a big surplus; we had low debt; we had a pension reserve fund; and we were funding our capital budget from current revenue. And people like the EU were saying, "This is a model of how you should manage your public finances." So I know with the benefit of hindsight I've no problem, that ... that is not what happened.