Mairead Farrell (Galway West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank Professor Whelan. That is interesting. I used to have a job where I had to listen to everything that the Central Bank did - the Fed, the ECB and the one in Britain - and I used to have to update my team. It is not technically correct that nobody listens because that is what used to be my job. The Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, was not necessarily listening to them but we will not go into that.

Dr. Kavanagh and Professor Whelan noted the inflationary problems arising from the extended supply chains but we have also been seeing, even before the onset of Covid, businesses engage in the process of nearshoring and reshoring. In 2019, a Eurofound study pre-Covid found that an upward trend was evident and that the number of reshorings or nearshorings was likely to increase in the short term. It seems, with Covid, and, obviously, with all the growing environmental concerns, that this trend could further increase. Would they agree that could act as a further mitigating factor in the present inflation that we are seeing?