Mr. Charlie McCreevy:

Sorry, but Deputy, you can't ... you're counter-arguing against yourself there. Is that, when the money became available to the SSIA person in 2006-2007, my ... I would think that most of the money was ... people didn't rush off and start buying houses with it. Some did; some used it as a deposit which ... I remember saying in the Dáil at the time that would be a good thing, whatever they were going to do, maybe some did. My own view is that the majority of people spent a little of it, did whatever they wanted to do, maybe send children to school, tuition, holiday or whatever. A lot of them kept a good bulk of the money there. But it can't ... so, and it was counter-cyclical, if you want to argue about that, because they were taking at least €2.5 billion out of the economy every year, so we can't ... the two ends of this thing.