Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 2 July 2015

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis

Nexus Phase

Mr. Brian Cowen:

-----let me finish, and that those people needed to be helped, because we wanted to keep that as competitive as long as we can based on investments that have been made in the '70s and '80s and mightn't be here for the long term, and would be lower-value manufacturing than elsewhere. So there was a rationale for everything we did and I'm simply saying to you, that as the input of construction-related activity was ... would decline, as it was expected to decline, and as we were budgeting for in 2008 and 2009 and subsequently, if we had gone the way it was expected to go, we would obviously have to adapt our tax system accordingly.