Mr. John A. Moran:

On the modelling, things may have improved, as I suspect, in the Departments since the previous crisis, but it is some combination of the people with the right information working together. It is the Central Bank and the Revenue, probably led by the Department of Finance and backed up by the ESRI, which has robust models to be able to look at different scenarios as to how we do that. That probably helps on that one, but with proper information. We need to ask SMEs and others what losses they have incurred. We are running a survey but others can run them too.

On the sharing of the burden and institutionalised landlords and small landlords, just the same way as business is both big and small, landlords are big and small. The Deputy is absolutely right that we have a burden that has hit a particular sector, but if it collapses, the burden moves along through the system and others recover. There is a need to find a fair mechanism to share that burden. Ultimately, the fairest and simplest way to share a burden in this country is for the State to take it on, in effect, and redistribute it either to specific sectors or through general taxation. As the Deputy has said, there is not enough money to pay everybody, so it is by reimposing levies or taxation measures on sectors that can do it. It is really important that we do not stop the decision about whether to lift the burden from SMEs by not being able to figure out who should pay for it in the next year or two, the next ten years or whatever. The State is uniquely positioned to lift that burden, spread it over a number of years and reimpose it as it sees fit, whether it is on institutional landlords, smaller landlords, utility companies or wherever else. That is the mechanism of State, and it is the job and responsibility of politicians, which is a heavy responsibility at times like this, to make those hard choices. That is why July and October are really important in respect of this.