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

Well, I think our belief was ... you know, we weren't economic forecasters so we accepted Finance and ESRI forecasts that prevailed at the time but it was certainly our view that in order to realise that sort of growth, you had to retool your economy very considerably and a lot of our emphasis was: how do you address the vulnerabilities that we had seen build up in the economy? So our focus was, you know, we need to fix a number of things to sustain that progress. We weren't forecasting a hard landing. We were saying, you know, "We have allowed vulnerabilities grow up here. We need to manage those vulnerabilities in terms of enterprise or restoring our export base-----