Professor John McHale:

At the moment what is being discussed are plans. The Commission as well as the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council look at the plans. There is no sanction for setting out plans that are not in compliance with the rules. The sanctions come in after the fact and so if we are talking about 2016, if the Government misses key targets by a significant margin in 2016, a judgment will actually be made about that in 2017, once the outturns for 2016 are in. On that basis sanctions might be applied. As we discussed earlier, there is a process before sanctions get applied. In this report we are talking about the plans and the sanctions do not come into the discussions at this stage.