Professor John McHale:

Growth is a very important question, following up on the caution. In a sense there are two conflicting things happening. On the one hand, as Deputy O'Donnell stated, there is encouraging, positive momentum. We all welcome what is happening on the employment front in particular but on the other side, and what leads to caution and the reason we believe the risks are tilted to the down side, at least for 2014, is that we know from history that the kind of recession we are going through can be very persistent. The Deputy is right that there has been a sequence of downward revisions to growth as the recession has proved more persistent than was initially forecast. While the recent indicators are very positive, we cannot forget about the type of balance sheet recession we are going through.

We certainly cannot rule out that there could be negative surprises. Those two things are battling at the moment and, hopefully, the things leading to stronger growth will win out. They appear to be but because we have had a series of years of downward revisions and because of what we have seen happen in other countries that have gone through these types of recessions, starting with Japan, the Scandinavian countries and a number of others, we still have to be quite cautious at this point. That is the reason we talk a good deal about risk and we think it is important to have these margins of safety in place. This relates to a previous question from Deputy O'Donnell and to Deputy McDonald's earlier question, and while there no guarantees about that risk-----