Mr. Sebastian Barnes:

Let me respond on two points. The first is that although we have been emphasising a lot the constraints on what the Government can do, we can also look at it the other way around and say that the Government does have space to increase welfare rates, to increase pension rates and to take temporary measures. There is a lot the Government can do and we are just saying there are limits to that. The Government is probably not going to be able to meet everyone's expectations so it is going to have to make choices. That is why we would emphasise targeting within those constraints to be able to give the maximum amount of help to the people who are struggling to buy a bag of coal or struggling to pay their bills, rather than to that section of the economy and of the population which is actually relatively well-off and has seen big wage increases in the past couple of years. On the one hand, we are emphasising the constraints but we are also saying there is space to do things, which we should be very pleased about. In some past downturns in the Irish economy, the Irish Government has not been able to do that as it did not have the fiscal position to do it, so there is a positive context to this.

In terms of how excess corporation tax receipts should be saved, there are obviously different ways of doing it. One way would just be to run down debt. The rainy day fund is an idea that has quite a lot of traction and that might help us through a future downturn. In recent months, we have been emphasising quite a lot the idea of putting it into the National Pensions Reserve Fund. What is important in a way is to take this money and to lock it away so it is not the basis of our social welfare system. Also, putting that money into the national economy is another thing that is contributing to overheating risks and things like that, given that people who are well paid in these companies are bidding up the price of houses and all sorts of other things. Locking that money away, which is basically what they did in Norway, would be a very good model. We know we have these really big pensions costs coming in the future, so that would be a sensible way of smoothing it out over time but, of course, there are different ways of doing it.