TAOISEACH BRIAN Cowen said yesterday that he took full responsibility for his actions in managing the economy before the property crash but rejected the “facile analysis . . . that one person caused all this trouble”.
Continuing his defence of his time in the Department of Finance, Mr Cowen held a 40-minute briefing for political correspondents in Government Buildings during which he said “in hindsight” a property tax should have been introduced.
He accused Opposition politicians of “rewriting history” and described himself as a politician who was in touch with people.
“Since this whole crisis has come, there isn’t a day or an evening or a night when I haven’t been concerned and worried about the impact this is having on people,” he said.
Mr Cowen said parliamentary colleagues and others had offered “constructive criticisms” about the need for him “to get out there and communicate our message”.
Asked if he accepted he had made some mistakes, Mr Cowen said: “Yes and in hindsight I’ve set them out.” He said: “We needed a property tax in this country. It was the only way you were going to properly deal with the property issue”. However, he had made “evidence-based” decisions, rather than “top of the head” decisions.
He said he had already made clear he took full responsibility for all his actions and accepted his share of the blame for what had happened subsequently.
Asked if he would apologise, Mr Cowen said: “I just find this a word game for this reason: There’s some facile analysis going around that there was one person that caused all this trouble. Things are a bit more complex than that.”
Mr Cowen said he delivered his speech on Thursday at Dublin City University because it was time “to set the record straight” now Government had begun implementing reforms of the banking system.
“There’s been a very politicised narrative, a lot of myths being thrown around in the white heat of controversy in the last year or 18 months and I felt it was important that we remind everyone of the context and the content of the policy positions that we had . . .”
Referring to Labour leader Eamon Gilmore’s accusation he had committed “economic treason”, Mr Cowen said: “I’m not prepared to allow people to make those charges and let them lie.”
Mr Cowen said Opposition politicians had called him “Ebenezer Scrooge” when he produced budgets. “I’m not a Dickens specialist but I know it doesn’t suggest over-generosity when you’re being portrayed in that way.”
While minister for finance he took “the full spectrum” of advice from various bodies. “And if you check the facts and you look at where the Department of Finance finally came down in terms of its assumptions, we would be probably more on the conservative side of the argument than the most optimistic scenarios that were being set out.”
When he came into the department in September 2004, he undertook a “comprehensive” review of property tax reliefs, “and now there’s a distortion of the facts suggesting I didn’t abolish them”. The State’s regulatory system had not worked, he said.
