Mr. John Moran:

But there are growth-related measures. One of the first things that I think we negotiated that ... I mean it didn't happen, sort of, with me specifically involved but I was in the Department was all about the jobs initiative. It was changing the ... the VAT rates so there would be no down, which was clearly a measure. Fundamentally, what happened in the troika programme, and again you see this in the debate going on at the moment about Greece, is the creditors cared, as did we, about the ability to repay the debt. So the debt had to be sustainable, okay. The initial interest rate structure of the programme, such as it was decided, didn't help on that front.

And it was relatively quickly understood that would no more help here than it did in Greece and in Portugal and that actually the way for solidarity to take place was to allow funds to pass through to the ... to the programme countries at roughly the cost that the European partners could actually borrow them. The second thing that was agreed was that if the individual countries could identify measures that they wanted to substitute, then that would be a conversation we could have, especially if we could show that it was actually a structural change that would contribute to growth.