Mr. John McCarthy:

Yes, the difficulty ... we highlighted ... if you look, Chairman, at the stability programme update in 2003, I think it was, we go into great detail outlining the shortcomings of the approach to Ireland. We have made a number of submissions to DG ECOFIN, the economics Ministry in the Commission, including as recently as, I think it was, March, April of this year, in which we produced, myself and a colleague, a detailed critique of the expenditure rule. And the Commission actually said, for the first time that I can remember, "Actually, Ireland has a point. We are unilaterally changing the approach to calculating the expenditure benchmark." That did not apply for all the years we have been saying, "This doesn't work for Ireland", we were ignored. It was one-size-fits-all, but we have made progress this year.