Mr. Brian Cowen:

No, I just think that, you know, obviously they were ... that's a, sort of, an economic orthodoxy that's quite prevalent; where you have growth, make sure you have counter-cyclical policies. Our position was that we ... were at a particular stage of economic and social development where if we just go with the orthodoxy of this, we're basically condemning ourselves to increasing unemployment, lowering growth rates and not putting in place the building blocks we needed to guarantee long-term competitiveness. So there was a period of three or four years where we were saying, "You know we need to do this now, we can't step back and miss an opportunity where on the basis of healthy revenues we can get some work done here that would otherwise not get done."

The other point I'd make is that, you know, the ... you look at article 6 in the Wright report and you look at the EU assessments of our budgetary strategies, I mean ... they make reference to some things like this but they're also broadly positive because they know that the position of Ireland in terms of its growth, in terms of its flexibility of its labour markets - which was a big bugbear for the EU with other EU member states as a barrier against increased employment - and a whole range of other areas they were very happy with what Ireland were doing, and as I say, were pointing it out as a country to be looked at by others in terms of the model that we were trying to refine. It wasn't saying we got everything right, but certainly the progress we had made, and the convergence on average EU living standards that we had achieved in a relatively short space of time, was regarded as a major national advance.