Mr. John McCarthy:

It was one of the reasons for ... I mean, you had not seen nominal price declines. The big problem at the time, Deputy, was that, you know, you had seen massive structural change in the Irish economy from the mid-1990s up to 2007. Now, some of that was real - it was the Celtic Tiger, it was the convergence ofper capitaincomes, it was real growth, it was driven by the traded sector of the economy - and the price increases were all justified on that basis.

The problem was from 2002, 2003 you saw a misallocation of resources away from the trading sector and into the non-trading sector.