Professor Michael McMahon:

As we have set out many times before this committee and in our various reports, we are completely supportive of the Government's proposals to establish a savings vehicle. A lot of details about how that is set up remain and, as with many things, the devil is in the detail.

As a conceptual idea, the idea is that we take excess corporation tax that accrues from activities outside of Ireland and remove it from domestic demand by not spending it today, and we build up an investment fund that creates a new revenue stream into the future that we can use, not to completely eradicate other challenges we have coming down, but at least it puts a reasonable dent in some of the challenges such as the increase in age-related spending costs, which are in the order of 7% to 9% of GNI* by 2050. That is a huge extra burden that would be in future core spending, and in future core spending it will give the governments of the day - and it is not that far away - a much tougher set of choices to make. If we make a number of decisions now, and they are relatively gradual over the next decade, we could build up a substantial pot that puts a dent in that and eases the burden to allow the governments of the day, as the Government of today can debate, how the normal core spending and revenue measures should be balanced across the needs. We have supported that. We support it particularly for age-related spending and, therefore, we look forward to seeing the specific plans that come out hopefully with the Government's budget 2024.