Pearse Doherty (Donegal South West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I'll move along anyway. If I can ask you, we've seen the graphs in terms of the explosion of credit into the market. And you yourself talked about that the commercial property was where the madness really took place. Mr. Ahern, your Government introduced the Asset Covered Securities (Amendment) Act 2007. It's reported that you were lobbied by the financial institutions, and the Minister for Finance was lobbied by Anglo Irish Bank. This is all on the public record and it was introduced in 2007. It was introduced in the statement in the Dáil it says that the banks were relying in the past in relation to deposits which is no longer available. What this Act did was allow for commercial mortgages to be rolled up into a bond and new funding to be secured on the basis of that to allow these banks to release more credit into the Irish market. Now this was in March 2007 at the peak, or close to the peak, of credit flow. Do you take any responsibility for introducing that Act which encouraged more credit into an overheated system at that point in time?