Dr. Michael Somers:

I spoke to ... well, I knew the former Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, quite well and I used to talk to him every so often. And we would have discussed what was going on in the country. And one of the issues was this idea of building 90,000 or 100,000 dwellings every year, it wasn't sustainable. I mean, he accepted that it wasn't sustainable. And he was very concerned about it. But, I mean, the problem is you're on roll here, and how do you stop it? And he had hoped, and I hope I'm not putting words in his mouth here, but he had hoped that the reconstruction of the whole centre of Dublin, the Carlton site and everything that went on around there, would absorb some of the workers that could not be employed anymore in building dwellings, because we just had too many dwellings. And there was a huge plan to redevelop that whole area and the Arnotts site and everything else and he thought that might take some of them. But it wasn't the full solution. But it wasn't as though people were unaware of it. But I mean, it was just, kind of, a fantastic amount of building. I mean, we were bringing in people from outside the country to build houses for them to live in, and the Irish people buying them as an investment. It was, sort of, extraordinary.