Dr. Donal Donovan:

If you were to go into it a little bit more, the Irish argument was "We are in a different world." House prices are permanently higher and the whole environment in which we were operating was different. I had earlier described these fundamental factors. The problem is that it is very hard to model these factors explicitly. Obviously they were present to some extent - a significant extent - but to say "Well, they explain 50% of the increase in house prices and the other 50% is bubble," was very difficult. It could have been 60% or 70%. There was a lot of debate about this, which can be seen in the reports. The IMF would say it looked at the fundamentals but the Irish authorities said "Yes, but you have not taken into account confidence factors, the return of emigrants or the number of immigrants." All of this was used to back up the suggestion that we were going to grow by 5% or 6% for the next five or ten years. What I am saying is that this debate was always going to be a little bit inconclusive, and that is how it ended up. One side did not really convince the other side.