John Lahart (Dublin South West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The Governor is very welcome. I do not wish to pile pressure on the present Governor but his predecessor made himself very available, which was always very appreciated by the committee.

I am not an economist and I focused on the Governor's paper entitled Inflation dynamics in a pandemic: maintaining vigilance and optionality, in which he fleshed out some of these issues. I will work backwards. Just watching some of the information anecdotally coming out of the USA, the Governor said:

We know the reasons underlying today’s inflation. We believe that those reasons mean today’s inflation is not going to be permanent but I accept that we do not know that to the same degree...

Looking at some of the countries that have their own independent central banks that might have entered into the inflationary phase a little more quickly than we have, what can the Governor discern from that?