Jonathan O'Brien (Cork North Central, Sinn Fein)
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I have a follow-up question. Regarding the deposit criteria, for example, if we have an increase in tax receipts in a particular area and we are looking at a rainy day fund or a short-term contingency fund, the Minister said he could have the contingency fund for those unusual events like flooding or foot and mouth disease as part of an overall rainy day fund, with particular withdrawal criteria. Is that still something he is open to and considering? There is no definitive-----

The inevitable question is that if we are faced with some kind of very significant difficulty to which the Government must respond clearly, the political challenge will be to use the rainy day fund. The best way of dealing with it is to define the criteria of how a fund would be accessed and to acknowledge upfront that even in using the language of "crises", there are different forms of crises that have a different cost. A flooding event or a natural phenomenon of some kind that causes a huge amount of harm to people's public property is a clear crisis to which the State must respond but the State going into a lengthened and very difficult recession would also be a crisis. It would be sensible to define the different ways in which a fund like that could be accessed in future. It might not be possible to do all of this in primary legislation but some of it could be done that way.