Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

We have the general escape clause, where the fiscal rules are being suspended. Many European states, including Italy, heavily invested at the time of the pandemic to keep their citizens alive, notwithstanding the issues that Italy had of high debts before that and I am not taking away from that. However they made a significant amount of expenditure to protect the health of their citizens and their healthcare service. We all saw the scenes in Italy, at the very start of the pandemic. Then during the cost-of-living crisis, as other European countries did, Italy also had to step in and support its citizens all at a time of the fiscal rules being suspended. However, when the fiscal rules switch on again, and therefore its debt is above a certain level, an automatic trigger kicks in. Dr. Sweeney is advocating that there needs to be contraction in Italy. This could impact on social welfare and could reduce Italy's potential growth and be counter-productive because of the timing. We have a rule which sits on its own outside of the reasons for creating the debt in the first place or the cost, even if we were to approach Dr. Sweeney's view, the cost of debt servicing. Bond yields could have gone up in the international market, there could have been a large number of stacks that had to be refinanced at a certain point in time and that may have fallen at a time when there was a global downturn where the wrong response would be to contract. Is that not one of the challenges with the fiscal rule that they are crude instruments?