Gerald Nash (Louth, Labour) | Oireachtas source

With respect to the concept of the national reserve fund, the committee has agreed to carry out a schedule of work analysing the optimum model that might be adopted. We are doing so in the spirit of trying to be helpful and co-operative with the Ministers in designing that innovation. It will be an important initiative for the reasons the Minister, Deputy Donohoe, pointed out, to provide us with the opportunity to make investments on a counter-cyclical basis if and when the economy experiences a downturn. We are still living with the consequences of some of the difficult decisions we had to make a number of years ago due to the economic and fiscal position of the country. Do the Ministers have any particular model in mind for the design of that innovation? For example, we are all familiar with the initiative taken in Norway a few years ago as regards what it did with what might be described as windfall revenues from its oil industry. Is that a model the Ministers are looking at?