*  *  *  Introduction I can think of no better topic for an address to the British-Irish Parliamentary Assembly than the similarities and contrasts between the performance of our intertwined economies before and during the global economic crisis. Economic activity and employment have contracted sharply and property prices have plunged.
Our economies have been hit hard by the global financial crisis but in addition, for all of us, the crisis has served to expose strikingly similar pre-existing vulnerabilities in our economies – not shared by most others in Europe – which would sooner or later have led to trouble even if it had not been for the global meltdown, notably: •  the wide-ranging imbalances created by a credit-fuelled property boom;  •  the growing dependence of the financial sector on wholesale market-funding, increasingly in the form of foreign borrowing, and  •  the extent to which the credit and property booms significantly boosted transitory windfall tax revenues, which came to be relied on to finance strong growth in public spending.