Ciarán Lynch (Cork South Central, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Okay, if I can just move on to- it's the CIF core document there, Vol. 1 and it's just the table of contents. We are not going to be going into any documents there, if I can just get it up on board. I know that, but it's ... and it's not to spring ... it's just to give a kind of mood music to statements that were happening at the time and if you move down there you'll see Dr. Alan Ahearne's article, 53-54, Sunday Independent, he is talking about, ''Rate rent reverses signal trouble ahead''. And we then have Dr. Ahearne going on again to say "Will the banks go bust in a property slump?" This is in around 2007. There's another statement of '07 from Dr. Ahearne, ''ECB will slay our property monster.'' Another statement, 2007, ''Time to get out of rental property'', and then again, 2005, ''What goes up often comes down'', and again, ''We are on our own if the bubble bursts.''

Now we know that Morgan Kelly had made comments and everything else, but they were earlier in the period and we know that Mr. Ahearne was appointed as a very senior official to your Administration. And when Mr. Ahearne was before this committee earlier in the year, what date was it? He was here in February 2015. He, in his second page of his statement it's the middle of the page there:

The 2005 Fed study of the international experience of boom and bust show that, after reaching a peak, real house prices subsequently fell for about five years, on average, and the previous run-up was largely reversed. Put simply, the bigger the boom, the bigger the bust.

Mr. Cowen, this inquiry has tried to, at length, find a specific document that exists from the Department of Finance that actually presents the soft landing theory. Maybe you can help us this afternoon. Did you ever read a document that was either commissioned by you or carried out by your Department that presented its own evidence of a soft landing?