Mr. Brian Cowen:

The issue ... the issue was, as you know, the big four taxes of income tax, corporation tax, stamps ... oh, sorry, excise duty and VAT make up over 80% of total tax take at any time. The point I'm making to you is, regarding taxes, we were going to obviously have a budgetary policy that took account of that reduction over time. What happened was, it happened like that. And it happened like that because there was a liquidity crisis, there was also a total slowdown in the economy, the banking system stopped lending and economic growth evaporated.