Mr. John McCarthy:

I'll come to that now, Deputy. The evidence for a soft landing ... we took the view that house prices in Ireland had never fallen in nominal terms and data have been collected back as far as 1970. So there was no precedent for this in Ireland. We did have a number of models. So we looked at issues like price earnings ratio, price income ratio, we had an affordability model. So, in other words, the ... when you looked at the growth of employment, the growth of wages, the decline in taxation, the new monetary regime, the portion of disposable income ... of household disposable income that is absorbed by debt payments or debt service costs was in line with the historical norm, about one third. The problem was we didn't realise that these fundamental factors could change so dramatically, that employment would fall by nearly 15%. Now, there is also ... economic theory is also quite consistent with a soft landing in house prices-----