Dr. Conor O'Toole:

I will pick up on a couple of points that Mr. Conroy made. The fact that big critical infrastructure projects like the Dublin water system are delayed for such a long time in planning simply has to change because it is an unlocking project. You want to achieve all these other objectives like your housing targets and so on and if you do not have those particular pieces of infrastructure put in place early to unlock the rest of the system, it just will not work. This is a really good example where structurally reforming the administrative system can help unlock those bottlenecks, without necessarily having to spend more money. They are administrative planning delays. That is certainly an area where reform needs to be pushed through to actual action.

In terms of an economic slowdown, Mr. Conroy is right on all of those elements. As well as in the tax receipts, we will also see that materialise in the labour market. That is where we will get a first lens into that. The labour market has performed extremely robustly in the previous number of years. Our most up-to-date quarterly is coming out next Thursday. One of the indicators we look at in there that might point to a moderation in the labour market is vacancies data and not only vacancies but also work permits data for market-orientated sectors. There has been a little bit of a moderation in those but not a slow down.

I have one final point on domestic firms. As Mr. Conroy said, the large firms that really drive our economy are the most productive firms in the world - not just in Europe, in the world. It is not feasible that we would replace those firms with domestic firms overnight. Certainly, building an ecosystem where small Irish firms can become more productive, grow and become internationally traded is extremely important. We actually have quite a good policy framework around that, through both Enterprise Ireland and the departmental supports. However, replacing and moving your economic structure from FDI-led to domestic-led, like the German economy, is not necessarily feasible for a small economy like ours in a short space of time.