Mr. John McCarthy:

I absolutely take the Deputy's point about the complexity of the various flows of funds and the changes that have been introduced. We may have spoken about this issue last year. The changes introduced from 2018 bring much more clarity to bear. Rather than have money coming in on one side of the local government fund and then going out of it, the local government fund is far more a vehicle that relates substantially to local property tax. On the model, as it stands, the Deputy has pointed to the needs and resources model put in place in 2000-01, at which stage we were heading into the years of what became known as the great Celtic tiger economy-----