Professor John McHale:

I was a little surprised by the confusion. Essentially the point we were making, while largely accepting the net fiscal space number produced by the Government - we produced our own for internal purposes which was broadly in the same ball park - was the stand still one. We were pointing out that a substantial chunk of the fiscal space would be required just to stand still. We probably made a tactical error in doing the subtraction because then there was another number for the fiscal space floating out there. It would have been better to say this is the net fiscal space figure, the Government did a good job in estimating it and this is the amount of it that would be required to stand still. Then parliamentarians and others would have had better information in terms of understanding what the real scope was for truly new initiatives beyond what was being done already. That would be important information from the point of view of scrutinising Government plans and coming up with alternative suggestions. In a sense, the two points are linked.

In terms of providing information to the committee, we are completely non-political and have to tread carefully. We try to respect our mandate but certainly at the level of the secretariat of the council, we are very open to talking to anyone about technical details, which is what I think Deputy Doherty is talking about.