Dr. Robert Sweeney:

Regarding the banking issue, which I can speak about a little more than the food issue, the situation now is quite different. Banking crises and the closing of banks are damaging to an economy and, while the banking crisis and the amount of money we put in to recapitalise the banks the last time, in 2008 and 2009, was damaging, what really killed us was not so much the collapse of the banks, which was big, but the collapse of the housing bubble. In the 2000s, we had a housing bubble. Too many houses were being built. It was a speculative bubble. Employment in construction represented something like 11% or 12% of total employment whereas the norm in advanced economies is about 6%. When you think of the correction that needed to happen after the bubble burst, that rate was not only going to go back to 6%. It was likely to go to 4% or whatever it was because there had been such excess building of housing. When you stop building housing, you also close auctioneers, Woodies, Currys and other retail stores that fill the houses. Even if the banks were somehow magically saved last time, we still would have experienced double-digit unemployment. That would have had very significant fiscal implications in and of itself. What I am trying to get at is that, although the Central Bank is not saying that any of the Irish banks are in trouble, even if one of them were to collapse, while it would be damaging, there would not be the kind of devastation there was when the housing bubble burst.