Professor John McHale:

We will certainly work on ensuring future publications are more accessible to a broader non-specialist audience. We have much to work on. We will strive over the coming months and years to improve our overall performance. We are grateful that the overall assessment was positive.

I welcome that the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council is seen as a pioneer among the new batch of fiscal councils. Currently, all European Union countries have a fiscal council. Even though the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council is relatively new, in that it only came into being in 2011, it was one of the first of the new fiscal councils to be formed. Some fiscal councils have come to visit us to see how we do things. There is a great deal of interest in the way in which we organise things. For example, the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council is the first of the new batch of eurozone fiscal councils to be peer-reviewed. This has been done on a low-cost model, recognising that we have to apply austerity to ourselves also. The UK council also underwent a peer review. As we did ours at a fraction of the cost, there are many councils that are interested in the model we used. We do see ourselves as a leader among, in particular, the smaller eurozone countries. In regard to the Deputy's question regarding the assessment of the job we are doing, we believe we are doing many things well but there are certain things we could do better. We have received useful specific advice of the things we can improve. We are always open to suggestions from this committee and others in regard to how we can do things better. We have heard some very substantive suggestions from this committee in the past about things that we can work on.