Dr. Gabriel Fagan:

In respect of the special portfolio, the minimum schedule is publicly available information so we can certainly make that available to Deputy Donnelly. I am not sure about the extent of sales from the portfolio but I will put Deputy Donnelly's request to my colleagues who work on that and see if they can put together information for him that would address his question. I am not sure if we can have much analysis on the impact of these portfolio sales on the fiscal space but I would not want to promise Deputy Donnelly something we could not deliver.

The last question raised by Deputy Donnelly concerned GDP and the underlying domestic situation. His point is correct. If we were trying to construct a measure underlying GDP, it would be wrong to exclude all exports and imports or net trade but that is not what we are trying to do with this measure. This is a measure of underlying domestic demand. Domestic demand is defined as consumption, investment, change in stocks and Government consumption. That is the usual measure and we are saying that it is completely distorted. It is misleading when one looks at that number. One gets a more accurate picture when one extracts these components so that is what we are trying to do. We are not saying that it is an alternative measure of GDP. Rather, it is an alternative measure of domestic demand - what sort of demand is in the domestic economy.

The other questions on shadow banking are slightly beyond what we were thinking of here. The Central Bank is engaged with the Financial Stability Board in Basel as part of a global effort to identify and monitor the shadow banking system not just in Ireland but worldwide so it is part of an ongoing international engagement. As Deputy Donnelly said, we have made major progress in terms of SPVs but that still leaves other elements that need to be addressed. This is an ongoing project that is targeted in collaboration with international partners. Hopefully, we will make progress on that.

I do not have information about the point concerning REITs that was raised by Deputy Donnelly. I am not saying it is right or wrong but we simply do not have any information on that.