Pat Rabbitte (Dublin South West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

It's very relevant to this question. The five-year construction of our plan was based on 4.5% growth per annum, which from memory, would have produced additional revenues to the Exchequer of in excess of €11 billion. So if you take the growth rate, provide for inflation, take the add on of what, 2%, it would be at least half that again. So they were the revenues that we thought, based on the expert advice from agencies like the ESRI and the Department of Finance that were available to us. There's always a reason to spend money. I think we would have tried to spend it more wisely than what actually happened.