Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)

Last Thursday the Taoiseach made a long speech in which he admitted for the first time that Ireland's economic crisis was due not just to the international recession but to failures of his Fianna Fáil Government. When one wades through the grammatical constructs he used to distance himself from all of that, he appears to be saying that somebody somewhere should have done something earlier but that he himself was not to blame because nobody told him what was happening and what was coming down the track. He specifically mentioned that independent commentators had not alerted him to the problem.

I have been going back over the record and I find that in August 2003 the IMF warned that Irish house prices were overvalued and that there were risks to the financial sector from investor-owned housing and the commercial property market. In September 2004 the IMF again warned of the potential for what it called a "disorderly correction". Many of us probably did not know at the time what that was but we certainly do now. The IMF spelled out that 50% of the banks' loan portfolio was concentrated in property, that the correction would lead to a protracted period of slow private consumption and investment, that the construction sector would suffer sizeable output and employment losses and that there would be a protracted slowdown in consumption growth. In November 2005 the OECD said that Irish house prices were overvalued by 15% and that there was a speculative element to property prices. In December 2006 Professor Morgan Kelly, in an article in The Irish Times, predicted what would happen and drew attention to events in Finland and the Netherlands. In March 2007 Davy Stockbrokers drew attention to the fact that house prices in Dublin were 100 times the rents being earned and that only boundless optimism would sustain that. In April 2007 RTE's "Prime Time" special report, entitled "Future Shock", warned of the danger of a property price collapse.

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