Mr. John McCarthy:

The 3% in nominal terms is in the corrective arm of the pact. However, there are two items of legislation, the preventive arm and corrective arm. Once one moves out of the excessive deficit procedure, one is legally bound to move towards a balanced budget in structural terms. One moves from a headline deficit to the underlying or structural deficit. There is a legal requirement that member states make sufficiently rapid progress towards their medium-term budgetary objective. It is country specific. For us, the objective is a balanced budget in structural terms, while for some countries with higher levels of debt or problems with demographics - the ageing of the population - it is more onerous and for others, it is less onerous. However, achieving this path, given that our potential growth rate is still reasonable, should be more than sufficient to comply with the one twentieth rule or debt correction rule.