Mr. Matt McGann:

The prices stuff is easier. The inflation stuff is easier. As I said, it will definitely still be wrong, but we have a clear harmonised index of consumer prices or consumer price index. We have a clearer metric. The wages are more complicated because there are more possible metrics that could be used. Our own projections for wages tend to be from the very top down, because where we use wage projections is to feed into our macroeconomic forecasts. We are looking at the aggregate level. We use something called compensation of employees. That is basically like the pay bill. It has numbers in it. The number of people at work drives that as well. That is perhaps not as suitable for trying to maintain parity with wages.

Average weekly earnings is used for the benchmark. Average weekly earnings also has data on hours in it, then there are average hourly earnings, and for the average wage, there is full-time and part-time data. The data are there, but the wages one is more complex.

As I mentioned earlier, the wages one is a very timely indicator of the problems that one can have with what are seemingly reliable data. For example, because of the compositional issue that it tended to be lower earners who moved out of employment in 2020, and because those lower earners moved out of employment, the average wage went up. Then there was an increase of something like 19% in average compensation of employees in 2020. It then has to work out the following years when those workers come back in.

Unfortunately, data can still give one problems and things to deal with. In the Irish case it is probably less of an issue in this area, but there can be revisions to the data. Even when one is using historical data, there can be revisions to data. The historical data versus the projection gives one that trade-off whereby perhaps one is indexing to the historical data last year or the year before when we would have perhaps had negative prices, and then there is a sudden change and there are very high prices this year. There is no silver bullet or simple choice on it. A trade-off is being made between different options.