Mr. Kevin Cardiff:

It's a fiercely one-sided presentation of it, Deputy. If you read what I said, I said get into it, deliver the best services you can, with less money, because we had less money, there was no choice about that. We had less money. We had two possibilities at that point; either the country could go bankrupt ... three possibilities ... either the people would continue to lend to us, in which case we could continue to provide services, but nobody would lend to us based on the level of fiscal adjustment that had been planned up to the middle of that year. There had to be more or we would have no lenders ... no market lenders.

The second possibility was that we would have to seek assistance from the EU and IMF, and it was fairly clear at that point that they also would require very substantial fiscal adjustments, therefore, we would have no choice there. And the third possibility was that we would cease to be able to fund ourselves at all, in which case our fiscal adjustment would have had to be, instead of being of the order of 4% or 5% of GDP, it would have to have been of the order of the entire scale of our deficit, which in 2011, even without the adjustment, was around about 10% of GDP. So, that would have meant cuts and tax increases of €16 billion, even before we'd taken account of the negative buoyancy effect, so even more.

We, you know ... look, I also said in that speech that at that time our ... the scale of our deficit was about the budget, I think, of the education and health sector combined. That's what we had to find. Without fiscal adjustment, without cuts that really hurt people, we would have had to do an awful lot more. And even if it was a dreadful situation for us to find ourselves in, it was a situation in which people a whole lot more vulnerable than the people making the decisions would suffer, but the alternative was a decision ... was a non-decision approach where we would let worse things happen. So that's what I was saying and when I was telling people to fight, I meant it. They had to get out there and find ... I mean if we were going to have that much less money, I wanted people to be out there finding the ... fighting to improve the services, to do the best they could for their citizens within that. I don't think that's wrong.