Mr. Brian Cowen:

Well, obviously, we had ... we took our responsibilities equally seriously but I think that, if you think back to those times, there was a great deal of ambition and hope and aspiration for where the Irish economy could go and we had come through a ten-year period of continued growth and it was a question of whether you're now going to increase the productive capacity of the economy or not because that is going to ... now, obviously, there were cost competitiveness issues coming into play, which happens on a tight labour market situation, despite the number of immigrants coming, the number of emigrants coming home, the demographic of our population, the number of jobs we were creating was, you know, averaging 60,000 per year for ten years and it's a phenomenal level of growth.

But it's also the case that domestic demand was becoming a bigger component in our growth than exports and that ... we lost a little sight of that probably and needed, in the aftermath of the crisis, to regain our competitiveness position by a, sort of, an internal devaluation through wage reduction, which was achieved, and probably the only place it has been achieved, I would say, in an orderly fashion.