Professor John McHale:

I am afraid the question on the NAMA assets does go beyond our mandate.

The final question was about whether the distortions we saw in 2015 might have been there in other years. To some extent, possibly, yes, but it would have been much smaller.

However, one difference between 2015 and what went before was that we saw not only that GDP became a very unreliable measure of what was really going on in terms of domestic activity, but so did GNP. Mr. Coffey has written a good deal about this. It revolves very much around a huge jump in depreciation, which also distorted the GNP number.

There was a question about the contribution to the European budget. That is based on something called gross national income, GNI, which is closely related to GNP. To the extent that pre-2015 GNP and GNI figures were not seriously distorted, it is a reasonable conclusion, even if we had some concerns about GDP, to suggest that there is little reason to worry that because of distortions to these national accounts aggregates, we would have been making essentially excess contributions to the budget. Some of my colleagues may wish to weigh in on that.