Mr. Seamus Coffey:

One reason for the creation of the council was to offer an independent viewpoint. The critical aspect may not be our interaction with the Minister or the Department of Finance but our contribution to the debate as a whole, interaction here with Members of the Houses, contributions to the public debate through the media and the independent assessment we do. Perhaps ten or 15 years ago, that work was left to a few lone voices in the wilderness. Now there is an institution whose mandate is to observe, assess and identify problems.

We frequently state that problems that emerge in the future will not be the same as the problems we had in the past. We might look back and identify signals and indicators that should have been noted in previous periods as being points of concern but the ones in the future could be different. We try to broaden our view.

We write fiscal assessment reports, get a response from the Minister in a couple of weeks. We interact with the Department of Finance through the endorsement of the macroeconomic forecasts. That process is probably aligned with a greater scrutiny of what is undertaken. It can be hard to identify what we are achieving but just as one does not put an alarm on a house hoping it will go off, merely by our presence we can perhaps inform the debate, identify issues that can lead to problems and hope that they do not arise.