Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)
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As I have said to the delegates previously, I enjoy these engagements with them because they are always interesting, even if I do not always agree with their outlook. To summarise, Professor McHale seems to be saying that things are more or less on target and that we should be able to begin to reduce the debt and should be over the worst of the big adjustments, the austerity budgets and so on but whether we are or not depends on growth and our forecasts in terms of growth are very unreliable and the risks of whether that growth will materialise are on the down side, to use his interesting terminology. In other words, he is not terribly confident that we will achieve the growth that will be necessary for everything to work out fine, as we are being encouraged to believe we will. That is not something that would inspire huge confidence. It is that a fair assessment of what Professor McHale is saying? Is it something that should give us confidence because it certainly does not give me confidence, particularly given the unreliability of previous growth forecasts and the failure of real growth to match the forecasts.