Mr. Brian Cowen:

Well, let me explain to you that the independent regulatory authority had the statutory power if they felt it necessary to intervene in relation to lending growth. I didn't have that statutory power. That's an independent regulatory power and I'm simply saying I welcome the fact that when they did introduce it, it was introduced and I'm sorry it wasn't introduced sooner. But I didn't have that power. That's the whole idea of having an independent regulatory function.

The second point I'm making to you is that we didn't move on stamp duty as I was being asked to do.

The third point I'm making to you is that I did abolish the property tax incentives. I did arrange for an orderly wind-down of them because if I didn't, there was a prospect of people pushing to do whatever work was left to be done by what was an arbitrary timeline, instead of just having it ease out in a way that wouldn't have unforeseen consequences. That's ... and that's a transitional arrangement that ... without which, it would well have ended up in a different situation and a worse situation. So ... and the fact is that some of them based on the comprehensive review that was done were continued because they were fulfilling economic and social objectives, which were socially and economically desirable. So that's the point in relation to that one.

In relation to the question of supply, clearly it was a question of how quickly could we get the supply side to meet the demand. That was done by 2006 and then we saw a reduction taking place in 2007 and 2008. And, you know, in a market economy, the only other thing that I could do, if you're saying what should I do, now that we see no lending growth at the moment ... or then and the economy crashing, was for me to decide, "I'm going to put the brakes on and say we're not going to ... we're going to cut back and say this far and no further." Against a background of long-term economic growth and all of the activity that was behind that, I didn't believe that was the right to do. The right thing to do was to deal with the competitiveness issues in a different way, which was to boost product capacity and by boosting capacity and having more public capital going into our road systems and everything else, we were going to make sure that the question of the housing situation would become a better outcome quicker than if we allowed the situation without a public capital programme to take place.