Mr. John McCarthy:

Absolutely, it is a point of view. I stressed this point when responding to Deputy Catherine Murphy at the start, and the Secretary General also made a reference to it. The fiscal rules do not constrain what one spends, they simply constrain the bottom line. If one wants to choose a Swedish type of expenditure model, one can do it but one has to be able to finance it. If one chooses an UK type, where Government spending as a portion of GDP is at the lower end of the spectrum, one can do that as well. It is a policy choice.

I do not want to go into policy but it is a policy choice as to whether we want to spend to address these issues, and certainly there are issues to address. We do not live in a bubble. There is nobody present who is not conscious of the issues, but it is a question of how to finance them. We would be concerned. The Chairman has a view, which is legitimate. I have a view that fiscal sustainability is the issue, because if we loose that it is back to the troika again. That would create issues. We spoke of the €201 billion debt.

Other countries have issues. I chair a very technical group on how one measures the structural balance, rather than the policy about it. There is another element to it in which I am not involved, that is, the statistical treatment of some of these issues, to which the Secretary General alluded. EUROSTAT does not like anything that Government tries to put off balance sheet. EUROSTAT had its fingers burnt with Greece, where Greece got the data wrong and suddenly it had a deficit that was three or four times what they thought it was going to be. EUROSTAT has become increasingly strict in terms of the balance sheet treatment of anything. We saw that with Irish Water. We considered that, in conjunction with our colleagues in the CSO and in the Department of Housing, Planning, Community and Local Government that we had done enough to keep it off balance sheet, but EUROSTAT came up with obscure reasons, which we still do not understand, as to-----