Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for attending. I want to take them through some of the issues in their report and ask a number of questions. I am getting a lot of calls from people and I am aware of a concern generally about moving into a recessionary period, what that means and how it will contrast with the previous recessionary period, which was difficult for everybody and lasted a long time. I would like the witnesses' insight into how this is different, the reasons for that and how we work through it. For example, the report presents a range of scenarios of various severity and implies that it would take two to three and a half years to return to pre-crisis levels of economic activity. By contrast, the economy took 11 years to recover after the previous financial crisis. What are the assumptions behind that and the reasons such different periods of recovery are identified?