Mr. Seamus Coffey:

There is no doubt that the revised national accounts were completely unexpected and the impact of some of these changes was not expected. In respect of how we react to that, the CSO says that there is an ongoing process to look at this and what the solution might be. I do not think we will end up with a situation with a bespoke Irish measure of national income. In respect of the process of coming up with methods of national accounting, by international standards, it takes years to come up with these approaches. The manuals run, not to hundreds of pages, but thousands. I do not think the best response we could come up would be an Irish solution to an Irish problem. The Central Bank has tried to strip out some of the things with its measure of domestic demand, which is a measure we also use. It involves stripping out the effective intangibles and aircraft leasing. It is not perfect but it does provide what might be called a measure of underlying growth relating to the impact if we can ignore these effects.

In respect of the 2015 figures, it is expected that it is a level shift so, primarily, it should happen once and one should return to more normal growth rates, whatever they might be in the Irish case. It is not really expected that something of this scale will happen again. The Deputy mentioned the impact of company restructurings and the abolition of the double Irish but, as he said, that is not happening until 2020 so it is not clear that companies would respond now to something that would not really have an impact until 2020 or 2021. There are various other distortions relating to US companies and their views on inversions where they wish to escape their US incorporation and merge with a smaller foreign entity. Many of them are choosing Irish companies to merge with and the US has moved to try to restrict that, but we are still not sure whether that will fully affect it. It did stop one major pharmaceutical company from inverting with an Irish company that itself had become Irish as a result of an inversion. I do not think we expect to see something of this nature happening again but we simply do not know.

We will have the 2015 figure that will show a massive jump - a big step effect - and from then on, we should return to more normal levels of growth but given the state of the Irish figures, that is quite hard to say. In terms of how we react and how they feed into the fiscal arithmetic, 2015 will remain an issue and as has been mentioned previously, steps are in play to smooth it out involving looking at happened in 2014 and what one expect to happen in 2016 and possibly taking a step in 2015 rather than including it. I do not think the CSO will say that this is a new denominator that we should use for fiscal rules. These rules are in legislation. They must have international comparability.

Our view concerns what the improvement is, particularly given the adjusted debt ratio. We are not saying that the debt ratio is 97% of GDP. We are saying that if we take it as being 105% in 2014 and one makes an adjustment for how much revenue the Government is bringing in, adjusted measure would be that it improved by eight percentage points so it is improving. It is not a measure that other countries use so one cannot ask what it is in terms of France or Germany but I get the point that our debt remains high.

In terms of the EUROSTAT figures, there was an increase in output in Ireland. We are not disputing that the figures are wrong but the key issue is who are the beneficiaries of that output. Given the huge role of multinationals in the Irish economy, if they have significant profits, we are getting perhaps a corporation tax cut of that, but if those profits go to foreign shareholders, they are not improving the Government's ability to service its debt.

That is the key message we are trying to get across.