Mr. John Moran:

Our organisation cannot calculate the amount as well as other organisations with access to certain information such as the Central Bank or Revenue. The fact that firms reopened slightly more quickly obviously reduced losses as revenues started to increase. However, we are not seeing any big wave of spending. There are some high-profile media reports about the queues in front of barbers and Penneys but as Ms McCabe may be able to discuss, customers are not rushing back to spend as they were beforehand.

The important thing, as I said in my opening statement, is that somebody gets to the bottom of how much money has been lost. We must have an intense modelling exercise so that all of these things are factored into decision-making.

The situation reminds me of life in 2009, 2010 and 2011. As part of dealing with the banking crisis of that time, it was not until the winter of 2010 and 2011 that a deep dive occurred whereby we went into the banks to work out how many billions of euro we were talking about. At that time, a range of figures from €15 billion to €35 billion was mentioned, and the final figure was €24 billion. One needs to know the scale of the problem to prescribe the right medicine. It is important that this committee is given all the information it needs to be able to assess things accurately. It is to be hoped there will be a good assessment for the July stimulus package.

The Deputies are right in the points they made about spending. I am reminded of a conversation with the great T.K. Whitaker at the beginning of the most recent crisis in which he said that the problem at that time was debt. I would say the problem that is going to arise from this crisis will be confidence. There is a lot of pain out there and many people are shocked because their lives have changed and are different than they expected. It is really important that the July package instils confidence again in businesses and consumers as it relates to public health measures. That will release the savings. Savings are at historically high levels because people are afraid that they will lose their jobs. Even people who have kept their jobs are afraid they might lose them next week. People are holding their money back and if we cannot find a way to release spending into the system, perhaps by way of people taking staycations, we will have an incredibly tough 2020 and 2021. The recovery will be pushed out too far in that scenario. That is why this is the moment when the Government must borrow money to release funding and restore confidence in the system. That is not necessarily helicopter money, as it has been described, because there are a lot of savings in the system. We need to instil confidence again in people as to what tomorrow will bring. If tomorrow is not going to be worse than today, people will start to spend money and we will climb out of this.