Mr. Brian Cowen:

Well, we did ... well, let's be clear. I mean, the actuality of what happened emerged within 12 months and we made immediate arrangements to change policy and to start addressing the issues that had now arisen which was (a) a banking crisis and (b) the need to cut deficits. And we brought in four budgets, which closed that deficit of €34 billion, as has emerged, by over €20 billion. We went two thirds of the way of the correction in the four budgets in the three years that we had. And that obviously provided the means by which this Administration were able to continue on that track and thankfully, by 2010, we had a GDP growth ... a GNP growth of 0.2%. We had steadied it - it had gone from -3% in '08 to -8% ... more than -8%, a contraction at the end of '09, which makes it doubly difficult when you're trying to close the gap between revenue and expenditure because your expenditure ... your revenue is going down as well as your expenditure going up and by ... as a result of the pretty tough measures that the Minister for Finance, Brian Lenihan, with the Government support, made, we had got to a position in 2010 on the macroeconomic front - we had other problems but on the macroeconomic front, that contraction had been arrested-----