Dr. Martina Lawless:

Perhaps Mr. Coffey could say more on this. This is a specifically Irish initiative to try to zone in on measures that better reflect the domestic economy and to try to abstract from a lot of the complications the multinational sector brings to our national accounts. We are certainly not replacing debt-to-GDP ratios, or GDP as a measure of the economy, with GNI*. We are just trying to use a range of different indicators, some of which will help to measure different things.

Obviously, some GDP and some tax revenue is being raised from multinationals, and Deputy Boyd Barrett talked about the increases in corporate tax. We cannot ignore GDP and the multinational sector entirely but we can look at a range of different measures. If a large shock was to hit the economy again, the current debt-to-GDP levels are still relatively high, both historically and internationally. That is why we continue to give quite a bit of focus to those and I believe they are still worth examining and keeping in mind. Running in line with the general fiscal rules and keeping a balanced budget will naturally lead to the debts trending down over time, so it is not really a separate target in that, as long as the budget continues to be balanced, that will get paid off over time.

The housing sector has been mentioned a number of times, in particular the high levels of housing payments for mortgages and in the rental sector. We have raised this as a concern in terms of the macroeconomic effects. Obviously, there is a big social effect but the high levels of spending on housing costs by households feeds into competitiveness and wage demands, and has a general negative impact on, as Deputy Boyd Barrett noted, attracting returning migrants to Ireland. There is a risk in terms of getting the housing sector restarted in that having people migrate to work in the building sector potentially has spiralling effects. That is something to be careful-----