Mr. Seamus Coffey:

From observing what is happening in the economy, as we pointed out, we are not seeing significant overheating of it at the moment. One reason for that is that housing output remains low. It would not be necessarily down to the Government in terms of it getting its act together to build houses, the private sector also has a significant role to play, and it could change quite quickly. Deputy Lahart spoke abut the number of workers coming into the country. That pattern could change and accelerate very rapidly.

We are just a small economy. If it is felt there is a construction boom in Ireland, workers can come quite quickly, so the impact can build up very rapidly. If we are looking at measures of overheating in the economy, we are not seeing it at present. Maybe one could point to some minor issues in some of the indicators, but in overall terms we have not reached that stage yet. Our warning is that it could happen very quickly.