Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Looking at the economy at the moment, a couple of things stand out. One is that our demographics are rather different from those of most other European countries. In the long run, that is very much in our favour. In other words, we have many young children and a much slower rate of ageing, although that will come into play by 2050.

We have a much lower rate of aging than most other European economies.

The biggest difficulty we have is the lack of infrastructural capital development, obviously including housing. In Mr. O'Kelly's view, how do we leverage our current quite positive position, assuming quantitative easing, QE, and no great disruptions in the euro? How can we manage the capital investment programme at the level we require for our population and to continue to be attractive to foreign direct investment, FDI, while developing sustainable Irish businesses at SME and larger scales? I would see those challenges as being really difficult.

In the context of Brexit, we hear a lot of discussion of the potential for certain offices to move here, possibly to the IFSC. There is a real bottleneck as regards housing, however, as well as in our overall transport infrastructure. I am not going to go on about broadband but that is a further difficulty. We also have targets in respect of environmentally appropriate actions. What would Mr. O'Kelly's advice be as to how we should pitch the capital investment targets that I think we really need to meet those challenges?