Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Yes, I suppose at that time, the key issue for us was, as I said, two things. One was restoring enterprise, innovation and exports, that was the model. That had been severely undermined, and we believed that part of that was a tax policy that would be more supportive of enterprise. So we did, with the economy forecast as it was then, to be on a reasonable growth phase, we believed that what we needed to do was to wind back the rate of growth of public spending, and introduce taxes and other measures that would drive economic recovery and enterprise recovery and if you look at our ... I don't have the time ... but if you look at our, our manifesto, you'll see numerous areas which we've subsequently done in government, of how we would rebuild an enterprise base and look at reforms right across the whole system to deliver better access to finance, easier to start a business and so on. So the issue really was, was getting value out of the system, and a lot of our focus was on, you know, restructuring the economy, not on the cyclical dimension. That was the ... it was about how do you restructure an economy to deal with the vulnerabilities that were growing up.