Mr. Danny McCoy:

I will answer this question. On the Deputy's initial point, the protocol on safe return to work is a national protocol but it can be enhanced at a sector level and we need to move to this now, to echo the point made by Mr. McDonnell that we need to take account of the specific environs in which people are operating.

On the Deputy's latter point on the deficit reduction being compatible, we need to take some confidence from the fact that this year we had a really successful economy until the interruption in terms of it being generative of resources. We even saw this in the Exchequer returns in the past week. What we will see is that some of the proposals are above the line, where the State will not get its money back and does not need to get it back, such as from the households getting the pandemic unemployment payment or the temporary wage subsidy scheme, but other moneys will be paid back because they are just deferrals or loans and they will be repaid even if there are some non-performing loans.

While the scale looks rather big in terms of percentage deficits, the reality is there will be much less deficit as a result of Covid then the headlines suggest. We have proved the business model we had is incredibly generative of jobs and cash, and the quicker we get back to being able to socially distance appropriately and take account of the virus and live with it, we will generate the resources so as not to have that deficit problem and get jobs filled again. The problem here is that if we suppress everything, including consumer confidence, it will be a lot longer before we are able to tackle the deficit and those other crises.