Professor John FitzGerald:

There was an interesting article in The Irish Timeslast week by the Governor of the Central Bank with a colleague in the Central Bank, Thomas Confrey, a paper which the Governor gave at the conference of my retirement. He has done a preliminary job on that. It would be interesting, using the models because the models are valid if certain adjustments are made to them, to do a counter factual, to go back. I have retired. If somebody wanted to ask me to do it I might do it. There is a lot of work to be done where one has to go back and replay, using appropriate models, the last decade and say, if one had run appropriate fiscal policy how high would interest rates, tax rates and the surplus have been. It would be instructive and would be valuable to do. Over the rest of this decade and it is an issue for the next Government, it may be necessary to move to a large surplus if the recovery is vibrant to stop the economy overheating towards the end of the decade. We need to understand that. That is a very interesting research project and will require significant resources to look and see what might have been.