Mr. Charlie McCreevy:

On the ... for the reasons they have along there, is that housing output and construction output had dropped back dramatically in the end of 2001.

So, yes, there was lobbying to have that changed. Now, there's lobbying all the time, and before the budget, you have hundreds of lobbying going on and we had a process in my time, and pre my time, of how we met all those particular groups. We didn't meet the same groups every year, we met the people in large groups, for about two weeks, for about ... every hour, from 9 in the morning 'til 9 and 10 at night and, some of them used to come before a committee as well, in the House. I remember that also. So, we would have had all of that. But like, as I've said previously, whether there was lobbying or not, the Government would have taken the decision ... would have taken into account the ... well, we would have deemed, anyway, that the massive fallback that we'd had in construction activity, which, more or less, proved Michael Noonan's point about unintended consequences. And I ... I think that the Dáil record will show, during the debate of Finance ... the first Bacon report on Finance (No. 2) Bill 1998, that I also said, there, or in another Dáil debate, that one never knows when one is interfering in the market, particularly to do with housing or property, as you might have------