Michael Noonan (Limerick City, Fine Gael)
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There are swings and roundabouts. Low inflation continues to improve our competitiveness but it hits the tax take hard. Budgets are built on nominal growth - real growth plus inflation - and if there is hardly any inflation in the system, we are down to real growth to provide us with the extra impetus on the tax side. We would like to be up at the ECB level of just under 2%, which is its mandate. If we had a growth rate of 2.1%, as outlined in the paper, and 2% nominal growth, we would have a different set of figures and we would not be adjusting by €2 billion. As for how I feel about it myself, in European fora I have expressed the view for two years that Europe should find ways of doing some quantitative easing.