Mr. Brian Cowen:

Yes, well, the situation is that there was a higher percentage of it all right in Ireland than compared to Europe where there was a far more settled housing market where the demographics were a generation ahead of us. The demand that we were having was because we're a generation behind, demographically speaking, to Europe. And so, therefore, what you saw in Holland and elsewhere in the '70s and '80s is something that you're seeing in Ireland today because of the demand that there was for housing at the time. But the point ... the simple point I am making is that, you know, not since the 1920s have we had a liquidity crisis like we saw in 2008. Not since after the Depression have we seen a liquidity crisis of that type and that there were pools ... huge pools of liquidity looking for places to go, if you like. Cash looking ... capital looking for somewhere to go and we were a growing economy, we were an open internationalised economy, we had a banking system that was able to source those revenues and credit rating agencies put them at the very top of their rating charts. So, you know, we are not a country that has our own natural wealth like older states who built up wealth in other ways in the past. We were a young, relatively young, growing economy which had modernised from the 1960s on, which had now had seemed to be in a virtual ... a virtual cycle of high employment, higher wages ... spreading of that wealth to more people, a fairer tax system-----