Dr. Tom McDonnell:

I would not disagree with that. We should not let the perfect be the enemy of the good here. Speed will be of the essence. Having said that, it is important that the supports be temporary. It is important that they do not become embedded and that there is not an expectation created that these supports will be in place in perpetuity. Our response to the Covid-19 pandemic was appropriate and extremely successful. There is much to take from that playbook in terms of a part-time wage subsidy, short-term schemes and measures like that.

I made a point earlier about equity stakes in new firms. I would not necessarily see that as being necessary for existing firms in quite the same way. What we are saying here is that there has been an exogenous, and hopefully once-off, shock to the economy, similar to the pandemic, as I am sure there will be others in the future, and that this is a kind of no-fault situation. The additional cost here does not reflect a fundamental problem with the business model. In many cases, it is not the fault of the business. There is employment associated with these jobs, so a once-off temporary response to get them over to the other side is what is needed. It is likely that energy prices will be somewhat inflated from what they were in 2019, for example, possibly forever or at least as good as makes no difference in terms of the time horizons we are talking about of one to three to five years. We do not know the answer to that.

Again, there should be scope to continue policies going forward, but also to allow companies to wean themselves off oil and gas and make those investments in green technologies that they need. That is what we see. There is a short-term emergency response while we are baking in the response for winter 2023-24 and giving businesses time to get to the other side of winter and make the appropriate investments they need. There will have to be a very significant injection from the State to do all of this.

As was stated at the beginning, the fiscal situation is very good and the cost of borrowing is very low. Our debt per capitais very high, but so is our income per capita. It is often not necessarily fair to talk about those kind of rankings where we are one of the highest indebted countries, because we are also one of the highest income countries in the world. A certain degree of context is often important in these debates.