Professor John McHale:

The Deputy's assessment up to the last thing he said was a very good summary of our position but he said we are not terribly confident. I think we are reasonably confident in the growth forecasts and that is why we have endorsed them but there are risks and we have used the phrase "tilted to the down side". It is very important to think about what can go wrong and to try to protect oneself as well as one can. The point here is what actions we can take now to protect the country in the future. Dr. Donovan talked about the precautionary credit line and that would be one layer of protection. We have also talked about having some margin of safety in regard to those key deficit targets because much of the improvement in the creditworthiness of the State and the return of our borrowing capacity has been achieved because we have met those key targets and there is a good deal of focus particularly on that 3% deficit target for 2015. Another way to protect ourselves in this uncertain world is to have that margin of safety in place. We are reasonably confident about the forecasts but we want to highlight the risks and to encourage actions to protect the country against those risks.