Dr. Eddie Casey:

An interesting thought experiment is to think back to Ireland in the 2000s and what happened then. If there were no fiscal rules in place and no constraint on how much they could spend, we would run the risk that a lot of countries might just add to all the other existing spending that they want to do and all the other measures that they have pressures in such as housing, ageing-related costs and wages in the sectors the Senator mentioned. They might also want to do the climate measures on top of that and they would not really increase taxes to pay for any of this; they would just do it through additional borrowing. What would happen in that case is that we would see a rise in debt. Eventually it would have to correct and they would be forced out of market access because lenders would not give any more money to them. They would have to enter a programme. Unfortunately, what we saw in Ireland in the 2000s was that Government at the time and governments across Europe slashed capital spending because it was the easiest thing to reduce, rather than current spending. I am not sure that really blaming the rules is necessarily a wise thing to do in this context.