Mr. Charlie McCreevy:

But, Chairman, I recognise where you're coming from, and I understand your bona fides in this particular regard, and I don't malign them at all. But I have outlined to you is that we were having considerable economic success, which gave us the resources to do certain things, which we could only dream about in previous decades. I think the ... Professor Wright, or anybody else, who's ... when he's talking about counter-cyclical measures, what is he actually talking about? What did he or other people want you to do? Well, the only other thing that I can suggest to you is that you impose more taxation, lessen the amount you're spending on public services, withdraw thousands of people from the public service, and, like, what would that do? And, by the way, other studies have been done which say if you were to have counter-cyclical measures that would maybe have an effect of maybe of a quarter of a percent on the harmonised inflationary index, you'd have to take about the best order of €5 billion out of the economy. That's not realistic in those years. What we did in my last two budgets, I lessened considerably, as I gave my figures earlier, to the amount of tax change ... the tax package. The social welfare package continued fairly good, but the tax package was very, very small. And I think that was the reasonable, the politically correct thing to do, and the morally correct thing to do.