Mr. Brian Cowen:

-----I have said what I would've done differently in my statement. I have said that now that we know where we are now, of course I would've had a different policy, of course I would. No one sets up a situation ... but the policy that we had at the time was a policy that was plausible and that was backed up by international peer assessment and by domestic commentary here. That's a fact. We had ... we had a situation where we were looking at extended growth ... okay, long-term growth less than the halcyon days of the Tiger but still a growth pattern based on a ... an economy that had been growing consistently for the previous ten years. And on the budget side, finally if I can make this point, and I'm sorry if ... is that ten of the 11 budgets were in surplus, even though I had minor deficits budgeted for. And finally, in 2005 and 2006, the IMF came over to this country and did an exercise, which took account of the buoyancy effects that you're talking about in relation to the construction industry and came back and told us that there was a structural surplus - even when they took out the cyclical effect - that there was a structural surplus in the Irish economy of 2.8%. So that was saying that there was ... we were not going ... we were not, in fact, trying to overheat the economy-----