Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Thursday, 2 July 2015
Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis
Nexus Phase
Mr. Brian Cowen:
I respond to that charge on the basis that you had practically full employment throughout my time there, we had growth rates of 4.5%, we had a lot of investment in public infrastructure, which has been a critical part of the recovery process that we have now. But those ... I've explained to you what the economic philosophy was in the earlier session, which I don't have to repeat, and I think those are very plausible positions based on what the medium-term outlook for the economy was. There is no economic ... there is no Minister for Finance that I know of in the developed world who can say, in the aftermath of this crisis, that he was able to come back with a situation where he didn't have to make serious changes to his budgetary strategy. I mean, that's patently obvious. No pre-crisis budgetary strategy survived this crash. And, you know, I don't accept that there was a mismanagement of the economy by us. Certainly there was challenges to the system, there were issues that we had to deal with. People can have their criticisms of it, if they wish, but there is a very plausible and clearly understood philosophy and policy position behind what we were trying to do, and it was being done successfully, and had, you know, absent this thing ... this crash happening, I think you would have seen, over a period of years, an adjustment that would have enabled us to continue on, albeit everyone recognising that the long-term growth potential of the economy would never be what it was in the halcyon days of the Celtic tiger.
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