Professor Philip Lane:

It is a good news, bad news story. I may steal the Deputy's analogy for future use elsewhere. The good news is that no matter what indicator one looks at at the moment, the news is good. There are core numbers like unemployment coming down to 6.6%. Mr. Dalton talked about the net national product growing by around 6% in 2015.

The Central Statistics Office, CSO, came up with another number in October when it differentiated the growth rate between the foreign dominated sectors and the domestically dominated sectors. The foreign dominated sectors grew by 100% in 2015 - the figure doubled - whereas the domestically dominated sectors grew by around 4.5%. That 4.5% is still at the top of the European league. The direction is good on all indicators but, coming back to the Deputy's point, the size of the economy is critical. That dominates how much public investment we can afford and how we think about ourselves in a relative European sense, about how rich we are as an economy. The message there is quite stark. There is a big difference when one drills down to a more realistic number like GNI*.

This is not really news. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, OECD, publishes household consumption levels across the OECD, which our committee looks at. We are just below the OECD average on that. That is, in a way, asking how people feel. Are people feeling well off or not? It is great that more people are finding full-time work. It is good that wages are eventually starting to creep up. However, nobody believes that the economy is growing at the headline rate. It is good news, bad news. The good news is that all the numbers are growing, so we are not in a stagnation situation, but living standards in the economy are much more modest than the headline number.