Professor Alan Barrett:

I want to be clear in this regard. We will park the 26% figure that came up this year and come back to it. At an earlier time, we knew what our GNP and GDP figures told us. We knew what they meant. Irish officials always argued that when we were looking at percentages - for example, how much we were spending on social welfare - we should look at the GNP figure because that related more to what was actually available to the Government. GDP was always bigger, but much of it was about profit repatriation. Officials strongly argued that we should always look at GNP. When I was on the fiscal council, we took a slightly different perspective, which was that it was too big to say it should be either one or the other. We came up with a hybrid calculation. It was not quite halfway between the two, but one could use a bit of science to work out what sort of weighting was used. The argument was that GDP was relevant to these sorts of things because some of it was taxable. While historically there might have been a bit of controversy about the argument between GNP and GDP, we knew what we were getting at, broadly speaking.