Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 1 July 2015
Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis
Nexus Phase
Mr. Donal McNally:
I don't think so. I think the metric we used was as a percentage of GDP. And, you know, it remained around the 32%, 33%, 34%, which was far less than in neighbouring countries, maybe with the exception of the UK, and on the same level as the US. So that is the ... that's the main metric we used. I mean, different countries had different traditions. The Scandinavian countries have high expenditure, high taxes. We were trying to run high expenditure and low taxes, which the growth and the economic resources allowed, for a time.