Mr. John McCarthy:

It is fairly clear cut at this stage what the fiscal space will be. There will be a couple of moving parts, as the Minister has said. We should have those by May or June and the Government will publish the summary economic statement. As he has said, however, they are not game changers.

As for all the flexibility that exists within the rules, we simply do not qualify for it because of where we are in the cycle. Capital smoothing is an additional piece of flexibility that works for us. For instance, capital was increased for this year of 2017, because one only takes a quarter of the increase over 2016 into account for this year. In fact, that was one of the reasons we were able to increase the fiscal space in the couple of days that led up to the budget. We have availed fully of the existing flexibility, from what I can see.