Mr. Sebastian Barnes:

Sometimes there is and it is episodic as well. Sometimes different things are happening and it is very useful for finance ministers to have a fiscal council that is helping to explain some of the challenges facing the public finances. There are the cases where it has been more complicated for different reasons. One concern in terms of the reforms is that we have these proposals in front of us from the Commission that envisage a larger role for national independent financial institutions, IFIs. There is a concern that the member states will push back against this and the role of IFIs will be less than the Commission is currently proposing. Now that is obviously a policy choice but there are some areas where it would very much hamper the functioning of the new rules if one were to take out that level of independent oversight at national level. It is not just us in Ireland but it is taking out the oversight of the Independent Authority for Fiscal Responsibility, AIReF, in Spain or the Haut Conseil des Finances Publiques in France. In a sense, we are benefiting from the work of these other councils. There is a danger in these discussions, which are essentially between finance ministry officials, that they tell themselves that these fiscal councils are a bit of a nuisance sometimes. They call out their forecasts for being wrong and hold them to account and therefore they decide to water that bit down. That is something that people should think about when looking at these reforms. It is certainly something the EU Independent Fiscal Institutions Network is following very closely.