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

Okay, thank you. Mr. Ahern, can I just invite you to look at a table that I'm going to bring up? It comes back to your own testimony with regard to indicators and this shows a huge increase in public service allocations between the years 2000 and 2008, a plus 141% in total expenditure, which was precisely double the growth in GDP over the same period. So what you see there is under the headings of social welfare, education, health, capital investment, total expenditure and GDP, the measurements are there and the figures are as outlined. Can I also bring to your attention another graph that will come up, where when you combine it with the statistics on the parallel major growth in construction-related lending, the bottom, kind of, amber-beige line is standard lending or other lending and the blue line is property lending? And you can see there on the graph it increased quite significantly from, sort of, '01 period peaking into '07-'08 quite significantly. When you look at these two sets of figures alone, were these not enough to warn the Government that a bubble was being created?