Mr. Martin O'Brien:

As Dr. Kelly mentioned, many of the things that will decide whether this windfall corporation tax stops are completely outside of the control of the domestic authorities. The amount of uncertainty around it is going to persist as long as we have it. It came very quickly, relatively speaking, and the risk is there that it could go away relatively quickly. The diversion of it towards the reserve fund is important.

In relation to the overall costs of the national development plan and investment costs more generally, it is also important, in the context of the longer term challenges we have referred to, that public investment needs to be protected. It has a lot of value and needs to continue. There are things that will require public investment to address some of the challenges we have discussed. In the broad, overarching framework of having sustainable expenditure levels, it is important to note that choices will have to be made between maintaining current expenditures or temporary supports versus actually investing for the future. It is a question of getting the real value of the investment spending into the future and maintaining and protecting that versus some of the current expenditure challenges we are facing. There are definitely choices to be made between investing in infrastructure to address the longer term challenges versus addressing the short term challenges through current expenditure. The balance between the two has to be carefully managed.