Mr. Charlie McCreevy:

Well, let's just deal with it one by one: the transaction taxes. The biggest transaction tax was stamp duty. There was 0% stamp duty for first-time buyers of new houses, zero. Regarding capital gains tax, I certainly reduced the rate of capital gains tax from 40% and we quintupled the amount of revenue coming in to the State. The same happened to do with capital acquisitions tax as well. And narrowing of the tax base, I didn't. What I did was that I reduced an unfair burden at both rates of tax. When I became Minister for Finance, the rates of tax were 26% and 48% and various other levies in between. Well, anyway, I reduced it, as we said in our election programme from 26% to 20% and from 48% to 40% over my time as Minister of Finance. I did most of that in the first three years. I ... and from then on, in the last two budgets, all I did was increase the exemption limit to take the people on the minimum wage out of the tax net. And if you look at the 2002 agreed programme for Government, you will notice that our programme for the next five years didn't specifically mention any more change in rates of taxation but said our goal was to have 80% of all taxpayers paying on the standard rate. So we certainly reduced the rates of taxation, we widened the bands, we brought in the revolutionary concept of tax credits, which allowed a lot of different things to be done in the meantime, which hadn't been done previously and we made these particular ... So I don't for a moment accept that we narrowed the tax base. And some of those transaction taxes, the biggest one being stamp duty, we had a 0% stamp duty on new house purchases for first-time people.