Dr. Alan Barrett:

I will take some of the initial questions about infrastructure and where we are at. The Deputy has diagnosed the difficulties perfectly in the sense that we have a population that is growing. It has been growing for quite a while and infrastructure has not kept up with it. In all truth, there is no simple solution to this. There is no speedy solution and there is no point in us pretending that there is. However, to link back to some of the points made by our colleagues in the ESRI and IFAC, when we talk about loose fiscal policy and worry about excessive expenditure and all these sorts of things, we are not doing for purely theoretical reasons. We are doing it because we want the country to avoid some of the mistakes that have been made over periods of time which had catastrophic outcomes. Our big problem at the moment - Professor McMahon or Mr. Coffey touched on this already - is that there was a critical lack of infrastructural investment for many years after the economic collapse. The reason there were very poor amounts of investment was that the public coffers had been bled dry. There was no money left. Even in that context, mention has been made of the funds which are very valuable. However, we did have a sovereign wealth fund before the crash. It was the National Pensions Reserve Fund, but all of that got put into the banking needs at the time.

Every time we talk about things like anti-cyclical or pro-cyclical fiscal policy and prudence, what we are really trying to do is ensure that the conditions are in place. What Ireland needs is a steady healthy level of public investment over the next ten, 15 or 20 years. The housing crisis is not going to be solved in the next ten years, pure and simple, especially with all of the other challenges that are there. I think it is really important to be completely realistic, but also to relate some of our policy prescriptions to that notion of what we need and the level of stability as we go ahead.

Can I just make one other point? Deputy Nash asked a question about incompetence. I sat here and thought about why is it that it looks like we might be repeating some of the mistakes of earlier days, in terms of our loose fiscal stance.

There was a huge amount of diagnosis around the time of the collapse. Two things were identified as problems. Rules and institutions were really beefed up around that time. I am not sure if people are aware of it, but this committee and the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council were set up in the wake of the collapse. In this room right now, we have two bodies that were specifically set up with the role and objective of interrogating budgetary policy in a robust way. There is the issue of institutions, in that they are here, and the other thing is the fiscal rules, which have been touched upon. There was a very strong move towards fiscal rules that, in a sense, anchored fiscal policy. They evaporated somewhat around the time of the Covid crisis and have never really been reinstalled. On the question, I always think-----