Dr. Tom McDonnell:

Absolutely. There are two parts to the answer.

First, indexation as to what we think of as the baseline or starting point for the subsequent year would be not only the welfare component but also the tax component. That establishes the status quo. One indexes to wages and everything gets uplifted.

That said, the second part of my answer, which will be longer than the first, is to agree with Dr. Healy and to say there is a revenue sufficiency issue. Social Justice Ireland, the NERI and many other organisations have repeatedly pointed to it. There are low levels of per-pupil spending on education, childcare, research and development and all sorts of other areas where it is completely legitimate to have a debate about sufficiency and the kind of society we want. I do not accept the argument that there is X billion euro in fiscal space every year and that no changes should therefore be made in respect of net revenue, up or down. The point of what I have said today about the indexation is that the baseline is such that everything is uplifted but that it might then be completely relevant and okay to make the policy decision to increase taxes or whatever it might be in a particular area.

Dr. Healy made the point about the revenue sufficiency. I do not need to restate it. It is an empirical fact. The per-person spending of other western European countries, particularly EU countries, is far higher than ours. We are way out of line. That is the reason we have a childcare crisis, to a certain extent the reason we have a housing crisis and the reason we do not have a particularly strong innovation system and so on. We do not invest. If one does not invest, one will not get the results. There is therefore no confusion or surprise as to why Ireland is where it is.