Professor Michael McMahon:

I am now the second-longest serving member of the council ever. Clearly, the answer is "Yes" in one respect. Rightly, our role is to advise, make clear and try to shift the narrative, and help the committee to shift the narrative and influence the Government. Equally, it is for a democratically elected Government to make these choices. On things that we have pushed for constantly, I am an optimist on this. The question is what would have happened if we were not here? Maybe the numbers would be even larger and we would be walking down the disastrous path we did before the financial crisis. However, that is not to say that we cannot do better. In particular, the things I would stress are getting the focus and the anchoring of our fiscal framework to be not just year to year, but to be multiyear and to get a bit of joined-up thinking. Some of the issues that have come up are really a lack of joined-up thinking. We are clearly doing things to reform the planning system and that is great. It could help and it does not have a huge fiscal cost. At the same time, though, if we reform that but we cannot make land available with water and electricity connections, then it is a fool's errand. If we look at the best countries in the world for public investment, we see that they have very much all of the things thought about at the same time. They are building a housing estate while putting a school in and making sure there are health services provided. Frankly, Ireland has had a good economic time but we have also had the population grow by about 40%, which is unheard of for most other European countries. That is a challenge and the question is whether we can get our system designed to think long term. As Dr. Barrett was just saying, this is not going to be solved in one, two or five years. We need plans now that live out the next 20 or 30 years, so that we are not sitting here saying the same thing in 2050.