Mr. Tom Considine:

Well, I mean, one of the things that you can look at in relation to that is that paper I submitted, again, and it's at pages 3 to 6 of ... of Vol. 1, TCO. And, essentially, at the outset of that, it says that Government spending was falling up to:

General Government expenditure as a percentage of GNP in Ireland was on a downward trend from 1997 to 2000 ... The total fall in the period was 5 percentage points. There was a 4 percentage points increase over the two years 2001 and 2002.

Now, that was in the context of the dotcom bubble and there was a lot of controversy about it but that ... the response to that, if you like, was a major step change from the direction it was going.