Mr. Barry O'Connell:

There were three elements to what we asked them to do. First, before we got the forecasts we needed to understand what the correlation was between a variety of different economic indicators and the volume of the port. Indecon went back and looked at historic data and said that the strongest correlation, to help us predict demand, was looking at GDP. The GDP growth is strongly correlated with our volume estimates for Dublin Port. That was step one. The second step was to ask Indecon for long-term projections based on the latest available data. That is what it did.

Then we correlated what we knew about growth and the economic indicators with their growth forecasts. This is how we came to the growth estimates. Then we broke them down by ro-ro and lo-lo and then we overlaid our capacity.