Mr. Charlie McCreevy:

Well, there was ... well, sorry for going on a bit but there was ... there was a big ... there was a level of controversy later in that year as a result of documents that came to be inadvertently given out under a freedom of information request from another Department, which seemed to indicate that for 2002 we're having these big cutbacks as well. Can I just explain? And there was ... this, actually, was never corrected, despite various efforts by me at the time to try and get the right impression ... the actual facts. At the start of every year we had the budgetary process ... we used to have the spending Estimates process. About three weeks before the budget, I'd announce the spending for each Department. Then in about February of every year we produced what's called the REV, the Revised Estimates Volume, which was the final figures for the Department. During the course of any year ... and it happened in '97, in '98 and '99, during the course of any year, around June, you find that different Departments are overrunning their budgetary allocation. And up until '99 we used to have a mid-term ... a mid-term adjustment and we used to make an announcement about it and it used to cause some difficulties, and ... because in order to make sure that for the end of year that the budgetary spend would come in at a figure that was given in the REV, Revised Estimate Volume. We didn't do it in 2000 and 2001 because no one was noticing what we did. We did it internally each of the times with different Departments. In 2002, after the election, it was obvious that we were going to have to take measures to make sure that the part ... that the overall REV, the overall spend I announced in February, that it was going to come in on budget, and what we did immediately after was make pretty severe adjustments to some of the spends to ensure that we'll come in at the Revised Estimate Volume figure. And that was stage 1 of the budgetary process. And then stage 2 then, were the Estimates for 2003 that we started the process for-----