Mr. Pádraig Dalton:

I think there is and I will outline that in a second. One of the things that I want to pick up on is something that we are maybe a little bit conscious of. I fully understand the broad statement that our GDP and GNP rates are meaningless. However, in a sense, they are not meaningless when one thinks about the debate we have been having since July. We have had an incredibly informed and considered debate in this country since July on a very important issue. While GDP and GNP are not useful indicators in regard to the performance of the domestic economy, what they do tell us about is the structure of the Irish economy as a whole. What they have highlighted to us is the sheer scale of globalisation activity. We all knew that we had a globalised economy. We all knew that we had a quite concentrated economy in which a relatively small number of large multinational enterprises dominated our economic figures. However, I do not think that any of us fully appreciated that the impact could have been this large. In that context alone, I believe the figures are very meaningful and have highlighted an important issue.

I believe the Deputy is right in that there is a broader issue here and we need to address it. What we do not need is an Irish solution to an Irish problem, though there will probably have to be an element of an Irish solution to an Irish problem. We need to think about the broader national accounts framework. There is a misconception that the national accounts framework is just about GDP and GNP. It is not. There is net national product, net domestic product, personal consumption and expenditure, and national accounts for the indigenous sector, which the CSO has done, vis-à-visthe multinational enterprise sector. We can produce the institutional sector accounts and the figure I quoted earlier was about the households. In a sense, the household figure is how Joe Public on the street feels the economy is performing. That gives one a sense at an aggregate level of what is happening to him and how things are performing for him. There are indicators that are already there that would be very useful. We might have to improve the frequency. We only produce some of them annually and I think we might have to do some work to start producing them quarterly. Some additional breakdowns of the data would be very useful as well. They are all the things that we are currently working on. We are not trying to pre-empt the work of the expert group. I am sure they will come forward with some additional indicators. We have already started thinking about this ourselves.

The big issue the Deputy mentioned, and the one that I do not have an answer to is at an EU level and everything being based on GDP and GNP. I suppose that, as statisticians, we cannot change the law. That is not the realm for statisticians. We can only deal with the issues that we are asked to measure. The decision around the deficit being measured as a proportion of GDP, or the debt being a proportion of GDP, those decisions are taken beyond the statistical realm and that is a debate that needs to take place at a policy level. It is an issue for legislators to look at a European level. Whether that can change quickly, we do not know. We can only talk about the statistical side of it.