Dr. Eddie Casey:

I totally agree with Mr. Barnes's points. The Deputy also asked about the economic picture and how the heat map has changed. Not much has changed in that specific area, but one interesting area that has changed a bit is the wage picture. I refer to the growth in wages year on year. They seem to have picked up quite a bit again, which is not something we expected. The year-on-year growth rates are running at about 3.6% in nominal terms. The comparable rate in the eurozone is at about 0.6%. When compared with historical norms in Ireland, that does not seem that high because we had very high wage growth rates during the 2000s. However, given that we have low inflation and wages in other eurozone countries are not growing at the same pace, it could become an issue for competitiveness and could contribute to future imbalances. One other thing-----