Mr. Bertie Ahern:

No, it was ... no, I accepted that earlier on the competitiveness issue. But, I believe I was wrong not to reverse the decision that had been made by the rainbow in the ... in 1993 to stop the property tax. I went along with that. I had brought it in, I had taken the hit for it, I took the political hit. I was hammered in the media, particularly the business end of the media about that property tax. I should have stuck to my guns and when I came back in in 1997, I should have brought it in. It would have been a good hit back on keeping the whole thing down. And that ... there wasn't much support for it but I should have, having taken the hit, I should have politically stuck to it.

On the competitiveness issue, I have already stated and I ... and, clearly, in the later years of the increases that we had in public expenditure, we should have, if we had've for a minute thought that we could go down from 70,000 houses down to 7,000 or 8,000 houses, we should have put away more money. Because it wasn't a question of debt-to-GDP ratio. The debt was eliminated. But we should have put away more than the 1%. We should have, if you like, if I was doing it now, and I knew what was going to happen, what would you do? You would have kept expenditure tight, mightn't have put it into pension reserve fund but you would have had some rainy day fund, which the Germans did very cleverly after they did reunification and the-----