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

To follow on that from that, first of all it seems illogical to say that any component of that demand is the demand of ordinary, low- to middle income workers or earners, given that every bit of analysis shows that they have lost, and that demand has been depressed as a result of the cost-of-living and housing crises. It behoves us, and maybe the witnesses - I know they are not the policymakers - to try to disentangle all of that. If there are demand elements, by which we mean spending too much in particular areas - that is really what we are talking about - they are not coming from the ordinary worker, pensioner or social welfare recipient. They are coming from somewhere else. To help us make the right policy decisions, we need to clearly understand that. I note that Mr. Madouros said that often the Central Bank's analysis is of aggregate incomes and aggregate demand, but does it not behove us to break that down a bit and have distributional analysis to see where demand is up and where it is very significantly down?

That brings me to the point about the danger of being procyclical. Is there also a danger of not being countercyclical, following on from that same point? There were alerts yesterday about exports possibly beginning to fall. Presumably that is because of falling demand in Europe and elsewhere. It certainly seems logical to me that if the vast majority of the population now has less real income, then at some point that is going to potentially impact the economy in a very damaging way. Maybe this is precisely the time to use what resources we have available to us to prevent a descent into a downward spiral. Countercyclical spending in key, targeted, strategic areas might prevent hardship, suffering and a significant slowdown in the economy. Maybe we could look at the areas where there are imbalances, if one likes, or where there is spending that is not contributing in a way that is beneficial to the majority of society or the entirety of the economy. Do the witnesses have any concerns about that potential for a downward spiral, and the need to use the surpluses that we have and so on to prevent a downward spiral? Could the interest rate policy now be contributing towards moving us into a downward spiral?