Mr. Bertie Ahern:

No, I don't think ... I ... but, you know, Deputy, you've been reading these things massively and I ... I admire you for all you have to do in that, but you ... you can see what they do. They give the upsides and they give the downsides and they give conclusions, they give some criticism, they give some praise. But I do accept what I said in that article is true. Competitiveness, of course, is a loose term that's thrown around.

But competitiveness, when I was talking in that article and many other times that I have accepted, and this is what I do accept more so than I accept the expenditure argument, I accept that we got the competitiveness issue wrong. Competitiveness in its broadest sense, it covers a wide range of factors, it includes productivity, quality of output, innovation, sales, marketing expertise, quality of infrastructure, and I suppose, mainly salaries. That's what competitiveness is, and we did, I think from the period 2000 on ... miss out that we were losing market share and we were losing our competitiveness and, you know, if you were doing things differently, that issue, I would argue some of the other issues, but I think that issue I don't argue about, because I think that broad definition of competitiveness, we were letting, we were switching, we were switching from exports, which in most of my political career in Finance, I was always ... my paranoia was keep exports high, because that gave us more consumption, that gave us domestic demand. But then we lost on the export and we moved to domestic demand and that was the mistake that we made.

If you look at what Germany did in the same period, they went the other way, gained 10% competitiveness. We lost, and that was a mistake.