Dr. Adele Bergin:

It is an amount of money of magnitude. You may rightly want to increase welfare and public sector pensions but to inject that amount overnight would arguably be counterproductive because you could just end up with a surge in inflation. If we know this took 30 years in Germany, that could be a good benchmark. I do not know. We need to consider a range and it is not from overnight to 30 years. Professor Doyle mentioned in some of his comments about how it would be if it happened gradually over 15 years. The way we could and should approach any of this is to consider if we are talking about convergence, which is a policy choice, over what period of time, which is also a policy choice, and then you come up with a range which goes from a small number to potentially a very large number.