Mr. John Moran:

First, this is a Government-approved document. Its genesis was in an earlier period when we indicated it was important, as we got closer to the end of the troika programme, to have a plan or strategy for the direction of travel thereafter. Last year in particular, it would have been part of our own allocation or Estimates. With a group of people, some of whom were in my colleague's area, we embarked on consultation both across the system and with various other stakeholders on what we believed was important for the Irish economy as it entered the next phase of growth. All the economists in the public sector met in one forum in Dublin Castle. We identified quite early on a number of horizontal themes we believed were important as we went through the process of considering the levers we could pull. Not surprisingly, those were the issues of innovation and how we could upskill the economy. Also to be borne in mind were entrepreneurship and how we could take advantage of our significant FDI-type environment and the domestic entrepreneurial environment in terms of start-ups, the butcher and farmer, all of whom are entrepreneurs in their own way. We sometimes forget about them and think only about the technology sector. It was also a question of trying to broaden the thinking so people would actually want to set up their own business as opposed to working for somebody else.

The third element we thought merited particular attention was that we felt we were at the beginning of a new era of interaction between Ireland, the rest of Europe and the outside world as Europe was developing and as the Irish domestic population was developing in terms of an open labour force and various other phenomena. We referred to the upside risks in this regard. There are constraints we do not have in Ireland in terms of the growth potential of the economy because, in fact, labour mobility in a single market, such as the one we have, is much different than it might otherwise be. We wanted to analyse the opportunities for Ireland to start thinking about itself less as a national economy but more as a regional economy in a European environment developing a banking union.

Having done that work, we decided it was best presented with three pillars, the first being the requirement to actually maintain a responsible public finance position. We can go through the details of that. It was basically a matter of returning to circumstance involving the State paying its own way and in which we would start to reduce the debt.

The second area involved looking at the fact that we do not believe an economy can function and grow without credit. Finding a way in which to fund the economy was required. In any case, these are issues that we had been addressing, but our work created a framework for them. The third area was to analyse, with considerable assistance from colleagues across the entire system, the Irish economy sector by sector, to some extent as we had been doing anyway. We drew up a series of sectors, not necessarily aligned to Departments. They were sectors that we identified with the CSO and we asked how we could move those different sectors forward. Then we had a stakeholder programme in which we considered the horizontal issues employing tables and groups of people that represented each of the sectors, and we tried to collect through this exercise the themes and various issues that were reflected.

The third section of the document identifies some of the issues that had cropped up, giving a sense of where we believed we should go. This was agreed because there was a steering group involving the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation, my Department, the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform and others.

When the document went through to the Government, it referred to the fact that all the Departments that are now considering their own strategies must do so by reference to this. The important point is that we move along an holistic path forward, as happened under the troika programme to a certain extent.