Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

It sounds like a "lose-lose" scenario. Professor McHale's essential argument is that if we ease up on the austerity, the markets panic and increase the cost of lending to us so we cannot possibly do that. We must keep them happy so that we keep the cost of borrowing low. However, if we do that, we effectively strangle any hopes for growth. Professor McHale pointed out that one can have historically low levels of investment, which we have at the moment, for a short period of time but if one continues with historically low levels of investment, one will potentially destroy the capacity of the economy to recover at any point and do very severe long-term damage to it. I put it to him that we are at that stage. We have had a massive retrenchment in capital investment and are at the point that if this continues, we will do long-term structural damage to the economy that will remove our capacity to recover in any serious way and put us at a serious disadvantage. If one combines that with all the pressures Professor McHale has also referred to, it sounds like a "lose-lose" scenario.