Professor Stephen Kinsella:

I thank Deputy Canney for the question. The case of Digital in Galway is one of the most studied case studies in all of Europe in the area of industrial development. Everything from the age of the people involved in setting up the companies, to their particular skill sets and everything else, is well studied. I can provide the committee with an excellent paper by Dr. Majella Giblin of TCD. It looks at just what happened in the Digital case. The success has not been replicated across the country. Everyone expected, for example, that when Dell left Limerick that another Digital-type scenario would take place but it did not, and there are loads of examples like that across Europe.

On the Oranmore site and the Intel decision, I think the company is setting up in Magdeburg now rather than Berlin. We are used to the Government announcing 200 jobs or 300 jobs and that kind of thing but in a certain sense we finished the year minus 10,000 jobs because of that one decision. That was not just a chip fab but a fab for fabs. It would have put us in a geopolitical sense on the same level as Taiwan in the sense of having semiconductors and everything else. I am not fully aware of why Intel decided not to come, though energy was a big deal. Having that kind of long-term strategic capability and showing companies like Intel we can do this and generate our own domestic capacity would be well worth doing.

I have a final point on coping with expectations. We have forgotten the art of fiscal forward guidance. When he was Minister for Finance Michael Noonan did an interview with Miriam O'Callaghan. This was during the austerity crisis and literally hours after budget 2013. He said if conditions improved he would slacken the restraints of austerity. At the time, everybody was aghast that he could be saying such a thing but he was well ahead of the economists in understanding fiscal forward guidance because it changed people's behaviour. That is very important and we need to get back to a much more coherent fiscal forward guidance if we are to get ourselves out of this. Exactly as Dr. Doorley said, if everyone expects a one-off every year it is not really a one-off.