Dr. Donal Donovan:

Yes, of course. This brings me to the second point, on the property bubble. Throughout history, for a genuine bubble to last for a significant period one must have credit policies - one must have persons giving out money in order to finance speculators, etc. As Professor McHale pointed out, in the Irish situation there is no credit bubble. There is hardly any credit. What appears to be happening is that those who had accumulated savings, Irish expatriates and others who lived abroad and those who had sold property at the height of the boom - one must remember that for everybody who bought a property, somebody sold it and the money went somewhere - may now be coming back into the market because a high proportion of the sales are in cash. While it is a source of potential worry, socially and otherwise, it does not fulfil the typical conditions of a classic extended bubble in the way that property bubbles in other countries over decades have taken shape.