Mr. Charlie McCreevy:

Well, I have outlined in my opening statement as to what the success of that economic period gave us and what we spent the money on and at the same time, we see we ran budget surpluses. And during my ... there was, of course, an increase in house prices over that period but there has been an increase in house prices long before that period as well. In fact, I took a little liberty of going back and looking at Central Bank kind of commendations for the last 30 years or so and you'll nearly find the same thing in every report of a central bank in Ireland and elsewhere as well. Central bankers are by nature, and rightly so, obliged to worry about things like inflation. They'll always advise the Government to run surpluses if they can run surpluses and even when we had large indebtedness, they were saying back years ago "well you shouldn't give any tax concessions at all and you should more or less cut down the public services entirely."

And Governments took some of that advice on board and trained their budgets, as I did in my time, in what I considered the best possible way and the proof of the pudding has been in the eating. We achieved economic growth of considerable measure. We did the things which I've outlined there earlier and no disaster came to pass. So I don't accept that, in my time as Minister for Finance, until 26 September 2004, that any of these disasters occurred as predicted by all these people. It just didn't happen.