Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for their amazingly wide-ranging responses. It must have been a terrible summer to be a macroeconomist. It has shattered and the shards are on the ground. We spent years thinking that GDP growth figures were gospel and now we suddenly realise that E = mc2 is E = mc3 in physics terms.

It must be very difficult. Perhaps there is an opportunity in it.

I apologise for looking at my phone. I take the Chairman's comments earlier about paying attention to the meeting but there is a quote from the Taoiseach, who I do not often quote, that I wanted to get. In his nomination speech after he was elected on 10 May, he said, "While on the international stage, the official record of the life of Ireland is one of exceptional growth and recovery, it is in the lived experience, the personal experience that the national life is revealed." He went on to say, "... I am anxious that the national record of the life of the time, be it the surge in tax receipts or the headlines on growth, must be more in tune and aligned with the personal record, the lived experience of the people". I thought that was a really good summary of the fact that this gospel economics must change.

I was also looking at the council's assessment of its mandate. I looked at the wording, which I am sure was chosen very carefully. It involves an independent assessment of the macroeconomic and budgetary forecasts published by the Department in the stability programme update and in the budget. In this process during which we are trying to reconsider our budgetary analysis and in light of whatever we must do for the European fiscal rules, could we not use it as an opportunity to develop economic metrics that follow the instructions from the Taoiseach, which are that they are in tune with the lived experience of the people? In response to Deputy O'Connell's point, Professor McHale said that the council was looking for metrics. Why not be ambitious and take the sustainable development goals and apply them to quality of life indicators? I know this is a difficult thing to do but it may give us exactly what the Taoiseach is looking for, namely, a form of economics that is more in tune with, or more useful for assessing, the lived experience of people than just bald GDP growth or inflation figures. It is a very broad philosophical question but it is right at the moment because we have seen that, in respect of simple adherence to growth figures on their own, they are not necessarily gospel.

The Secretary General of the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform is another person I would not usually quote as my first source of wisdom but he got it absolutely right when he asked in the national economic dialogue whether in respect of assessing our budgetary process we can get away from just assessing if it should be €1 billion or €1.2 billion and look at the lump sum of our expenditure and come up with answers as to whether we should stop spending in certain areas. Is the council unable to give us an independent assessment of this? Could we look at the productivity of our expenditure within the public expenditure area as one of the ways of assessing our progress or success rather than just looking at the headline quantum? As one example, could we do this to try to assess the productivity output of the public service, the money we are spending? This is particularly important at the moment because unless we have a baseline indicator of productivity, however we might want to measure that, how are we going to assess the next phase of our economic public service issues around, for example, pay issues after the Lansdowne Road agreement? Connecting pay increases to productivity increases that are real is surely the lesson from the crash. The benchmarking process was not capable of delivering that assessment. In response to an earlier question, Mr. Tutty said that the Department of Finance is looking at different metrics of performance measurement and so on. Can the council get involved in this, especially in assessing how innovative our public service is and what sort of output improvements we will get? Can we take that into account as part of a revised assessment of economic performance? It is tough but if we do not do that, economics is not connected to the real-life experience of our public servants as well as our people.