Professor John McHale:

From our understanding, the breakdown of the €1.2 billion is approximately 50:50 between expenditure and revenue measures. The Government projects that demographic pressures will add approximately €300 million per year, which suggests that approximately half the expenditure increase would meet those demographic pressures. In the report, we ran our own scenario which would suggest that the demographic pressures are somewhat higher than that, potentially close to €500 million rather than €300 million. To this extent, the demographic pressures would come reasonably close to using up the €600 million the Government has identified.