Mr. John McCarthy:

We must come back to the legislation and the MOU. All eurozone countries are required to outsource their macro-economic forecasts, not their budgetary forecasts, or else have them endorsed by an independent authority. We are in the same boat as every other European country. This is because in some countries overly optimistic macro-economic forecasts have been an important source of deficit bias. That is the not case in Ireland, but it is the reason for the two pack legislation. Owing to that legislation, we need to have our economic forecasts endorsed by those whom the Minister chose, the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council. We stated to the council that we would only ask it to endorse the economic forecasts. We did not make any reference in the presentation to it to the budgetary position, budgetary policy or anything along these lines. The only reference on the budgetary side was aimed at emphasising that the working assumption was there would be consolidation to a figure of €3.1 billion. The agreement with the Minister was that we would give the exact same presentation today that was given to the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council. Since we did not discuss issues of a fiscal nature with it, it would not be appropriate for me to discuss them here and I do not have a mandate to discuss them. I am sorry, but I cannot answer the Deputy's question. We are on the macro-economic side of the house. Obviously, we liaise with our colleagues on the budgetary side, but we have a mandate to discuss the macro-economic numbers and nothing else.