Professor John McHale:

Typically, people look at what is happening to inflationary pressures. I think we know from experience in Ireland that there is a need to look beyond that. The signs of unsustainability that showed up during the last unsustainable boom included the very large current account balance, the loss of competitiveness, the overheating in the housing market and the excessive credit growth. In each of our reports, we monitor for signs of these imbalances. At the moment, we do not see signs of serious overheating in the Irish economy across most of these indicators. If the sort of growth we have been experiencing recently were to continue, we would probably be moving into a phase where signs of overheating across the broad range of indicators we monitor would begin to become apparent.