Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 2 July 2015

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis

Nexus Phase

Mr. Brian Cowen:

No, you're helping me well, because I'm explaining to you; that whatever, you know ... we had policy decisions to make, we had a medium-term outlook, with which you agreed. There was a broad consensus in the political parties of this country that growth in this country would be between 4% and 5% out over the period. You have to make economic plans and decisions based on certain assumptions, those were the assumptions. When the realities change you change the policy, Deputy, that's the way it works. And we did change the policy and we had to change fundamentally the policy because we ended up in a totally different situation-----