Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 17 June 2015

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis

Nexus Phase

Mr. Tom Considine:

Yes, there was a paper submitted to the Minster. One of the issues would be - and, you know, it was modelled by the ESRI, I think, in 2004 as well - if the output of housing, for example, fell from, you know, whatever it was, 80,000, 90,000 maybe to 40,000, what would be the impact and what could the Government do to replace that in the economy? And there is a paper - I think it's in the core documents somewhere - that was done in relation to that. In relation to the taxation which you're asking, I mean, the work that I was talking about there was more or less the ... when the tax take fell sharply in 2001 and 2002, the work was concerned about understanding why that happened, could we improve the forecasting methods and that kind of stuff, rather than replacing the taxes.