Mr. Charlie McCreevy:

Well, that's the same argument, Deputy, that you can make and justifiably so, with grants. Like, when you give grants to new houses or things like that over the years, in fact, it's built in, or new grants for anything in areas of construction, it's built in then to the price, it's taken up by the person that's doing the job or building the house or selling the house. There's always that particular difficulty.

What we tried to do with stamp duty and I made so many changes that we made ... I made quite a simple system that I started off with into a very complicated one and my goal all the time in all the years of taxation were to make things simple because I think that's the best way to get the maximum amount of money from any area. You'd have a very simple system and a very transparent one. But what happened in the stamp duty area to do with price we were trying give a benefit and trying to skew the market in favour of the first-time buyer. It just didn't work.