Professor John McHale:

Unfortunately, I cannot give a precise answer to that. However, we can talk about some preliminary analysis the council has done, which we hope to publish in our next assessment report. The Department will have similar analysis in its upcoming stability programme update. However, we make the caveat that huge uncertainties surround the outlook.

The exercise we conducted was to see what fiscal adjustments would be required to do enough to meet all the fiscal rules that are now part of the Fiscal Responsibility Act, the budgetary rule and the Stability and Growth Pact, taking essential assumptions about likely growth out to 2020 and doing enough to meet all the fiscal rules. The key numbers coming from that are the numbers equivalent to the fiscal adjustment numbers we have become so used to, the €3.5 billion for this year, the €3.1 billion for 2014 and the €2 billion for 2015. Essentially, we were asking what those numbers would be from 2016 to 2020 under central growth assumptions and ensuring we stayed on the right side of all the fiscal rules. While the answer is only provisional and not ready for publication yet, the good news is that in 2016 we turn from having to make these difficult adjustments to positive numbers, which seem to be, in the ball park, in line to keep expenditure in line with inflation. It is far from a bonanza at that point, but it is a very different situation from what we face up to 2015.

This is based on a lot of assumptions and we have to see how things will unfold.