Kieran O'Donnell (Limerick City, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

And there appears to have been a marked shift, '03 and '04, there was ... there were ... there were reductions in the spending in both budgets of €900 million for December budget '03 and €500 million for budget 2004.

And we find in '05, suddenly almost overnight that you had an increase in expenditure of €1 billion in '05, and '06 you had an increase overall from the previous year of around ... nearly 11% by the end, when it eventually arose. How did that arise, because the fundamentals appear to be in relatively the same over those four years? Was it a ministerial decision?