Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael)

I thank the Deputy for the question. The model that she is referring to is all done at a macro level. We looked at whether it would be possible to more at a sectoral level and we had two difficulties in relation to that. The first is that within the sectors, there can be a small number of companies that can have a very big effect on the sector and we were not able to confidently model what could happen within that sector. That was issue number one.

The second issue was that at the point we were doing this work, it was so unclear what might happen with sector-specific tariffs that we were not able to model that in a way that would be of any use to thinking about the future of our economy. That being said, just to fill this out a little bit, we are having a huge amount of sector-specific engagement. At an official level, the Department of Finance is always engaging with companies in different sectors of our economy and under the auspices of the trade forum that have been put in place. What that forum is doing is taking a different sectoral focus every month. The Department is on it and we are getting very good feedback from the companies,the IDA and Enterprise Ireland on sector-specific risks and issues. I should say that it is not all risks; there are plenty of opportunities. We are getting feedback at that level. We could not come up with anything that would be useful to the Senator by doing it on a sectoral basis.