Dr. Kieran McQuinn:

That is a really interesting observation. We have to put our hands on our hearts and say that forecasting the impact of Covid-19 has been very difficult, in terms of the overall impact on the macroeconomy. When Covid-19 initially hit the economy in March last year, we had very draconian estimates for what we felt would happen to national output and national income. We talked about a decline of anywhere in the region of 8%, 9% or 10%. What we actually saw in the economy last year was growth of 3.5%. A lot of that was mainly down to the multinational sector and the relatively strong performance of certain exporting sectors of the economy.

It is possibly the case that we overestimated, in particular at the outset, the impact of Covid-19 on the economy. Equally, one could say that in some of our other forecasts in areas like consumption we were pretty accurate in what we said would happen, namely, the sharp downturn.

Overall, if the Chair is asking me to explain why the effects were more benign or why we did not have the fall-off in emissions that we forecasted at that time, it is probably down to the fact that there was a tendency initially to overestimate the impact of Covid-19 on the economy and, consequently, its impact on issues like carbon emissions or overall emission levels. It is a very good point.

At some stage we will carry out our next economic outlook. As the committee knows, we typically provide a quarterly economic commentary, which is a short-term forecast, four times a year. Every five or six years we carry out a longer term forecast over a ten-year horizon. We will do that at some point in the near future. Clearly, the work our teams are doing in the environmental area will be central to that work.