Mr. John Gormley:

The democratic mandate, nobody could have foreseen the collapse and, you know, this was an unprecedented situation. We were ... we were there ... we were forced to take the most unpalatable decisions but we did so trying our best to make these budgets as progressive as possible. And we had a backroom team working on that and I'm proud to say that each of those budgets was progressive, that they actually did hit the wealthier people a lot more than poorer people.

And, Deputy, can I say, you know, I think I've had a conversation with you before about this that, you know, in an ideal world, if we could clone Joe Higgins and create 90 Joe Higgins and you had a majority in government, I'm telling you now that your room for manoeuvre in government would be limited in a crisis like this. You would have to make terrible decisions like Syriza in Greece. It's something you don't want to do, but you ... it's forced on you and, you know, I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy, but that's the situation that we were in. We had to take those decisions and I think they were the right decisions.