Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party)
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I join in the best wishes and thanks everyone has given to Professor McHale. He has done a really good job with his council and it is very much appreciated. I am slightly scared that we are back in a whole range of different ways to some of the conditions that created the economic difficulty. I really like what he said earlier about it not being left or right but whatever one's political view, if one believes in government it behoves all to be involved. It is easy sometimes to characterise fiscal prudence as a conservative right wing mantra but if one believes in government, I suppose it also makes sense.

I wish to ask some very simple questions because there is so much information here one could be overloaded. I found the document very interesting. Figure 2.8 refers to the labour share as a percentage of GNP and I thought that was interesting. This is a big broad question. One of the characteristics of what is happening around the world in the past five to ten years is that this graph is borne out in reality across most of western developed economies. The share of income to labour has fallen across the board and has remained low for a long period, beyond any historical context. I cannot remember the figures historically but typically it is up around 45% to 50%. That is a projection forward to set it at 38%. My understanding is that is what has happened in most western developed economies in the past five years at least. That is a very big macroeconomic question, but it relates to some of the questions we have around pay, which must be part of the debate. Did the overall western world economic model get something wrong in terms of what it is allowing? Even the German recovery, whose economy is ahead of us, had a very difficult time in incorporating the former East Germany and one of the things it seems to have done is retained capital to corporations as the big economic approach. Do the witnesses have any thoughts on that in terms of the share of labour in terms of the GNP figure? Am I correct in saying that is uncharted economic territory in the big wide historic sense?