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

2008. No later than quarter 2 of 2008, okay.

If I can just deal with one final issue then, Mr. McCarthy. There's a table in your evidence book there, and I just want to bring that up. And the two tables relate ... one is a ... it deals with sectoral lending volumes, in billions, and you can see a, kind of a, significant growth factor there from ... going from '01 into '02 and then a massive escalation ... quite significant escalation where we go from just in about ... I reckon these are millions ... I'm assuming ... in around €50 million in around 2003 up to €250 million in 2007. There's quite a big peak. And there's another table here ... sorry, they're billions actually. I've just been ... they're not millions, they're actually billions. I just wanted to bring up another table there as well for you and that relates to the increases in public services allocations. These are from 2000 to 2008. What we see here is in millions again, but if you remove the commas, I presume ... or go by the commas, they're actually billions. We see, in social welfare, an increase in that period of 160%. That's from €6 billion to over €17 billion; in education, just under €4 billion to €8.5 billion - I'm just giving the approximate figures here now to you; health, of just under €5.5 billion to €15 billion or, actually, over €15 billion; capital investment going from €9 billion up to €9 billion; total expenditure going from just under €26 billion to over €62 billion, an increase of 141%; in terms of GDP, expenditure of plus 71%. Okay, so in regard to that table, what we see here is a huge increase in public expenditure allocations between 2000 and 2008 at 141% in total, which was precisely double the growth in GDP over the same period. As I then say, when combined with the statistics on the parallel major growth in construction-related lending, were these two sets of figures alone not sufficient warning for Government that a bubble was being created?