Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)
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I agree completely with that. I welcome the entire process and it is good that it is being opened up. We have to figure out how best to establish that process to achieve the maximum transparency and the most comprehensive debate in the run-in to producing a budget.

Professor Barrett made a point about not having ideological baggage and so on. One of the issues Nyberg pointed out in his report was that contrarian thinking was not taken seriously. That was an understatement in the context of the failure of all sorts of models and think tanks to see what was coming in 2008 and to understand how severe it could be. ESRI staff put their hands up and said they did not recognise the extent of the banking and financial crisis. How can we be sure the same is not happening again and that contrarian thinking is still not being marginalised within the ESRI or anywhere else?

When I studied economics for the leaving certificate, the entire book by Noel T. Palmer was about market theory. There was one page on Marx's labour theory of value and it just said it was wrong.

They just went on to enunciate the Smith and Ricardo outlook. Can Professor Barrett assure me that the contrarians get a fair shot?