Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

The other way it is possible to help in this regard is through dealing with things like underemployment. This may be, and I suspect is significantly, connected to a lack of childcare or affordable childcare. If we were to lessen this impact, then we could potentially free up significant amounts of skill and labour to help deal with these capacity constraints. Do the witnesses think a good way to look at things is to examine how we can strategically invest these surpluses to deal with things like these capacity constraints?

My other point, about which I have already kind of asked a question but the witnesses are welcome to elaborate on their response, is that the obvious lesson to take from our overdependence on a small number of companies for these surpluses is that we must use these funds to diversify the economy and that we must do so rapidly because we will be in deep trouble if anything happens to any of them. Let us hope this does not happen.

Judging historically on the ups and downs of companies and economic cycles, the likelihood is that it will not last forever. Therefore, we need a pretty urgent look at how we diversify the economy. It would again require prudent spending of these big surpluses to identify some key areas that we can diversify.