Mr. Charlie McCreevy:

Well, as has been explained to the committee previously, in the middle of year, in June every year, a memorandum would be agreed with the Government and that would assess the starting of the budgetary process. It really started in the Estimates campaign and then over the course of the summer and into September-October, you would have bilateral meetings with ... officials would have bilateral meetings and then finally, you would have bilateral meetings with individual Ministers about outstanding issues. That's the process that went through. In all of those years that you show there, you'll see that the memorandum in June was ... and compared that with the tax and welfare package in the budget, that the memorandum in June is a higher figure except one year and that was the budget for 2003.