Mr. Sebastian Barnes:

I thank Deputy Doherty. It was a concern and disappointment to us that the SES, which is a major statement of Government policy, did not include updated macroeconomic projections. There were some updates on the international side, but the domestic parts failed to take into account two significant developments. The first was that the short-term news in the economy has been much more positive than it was when the special purpose entity, SPE, was set up in April. The second is that the fiscal stance has changed very significantly. It was a major flaw in the SES that it did not update the macroeconomic projections in what was a major statement of Government policy.

As a result of that, as the Deputy correctly noted we developed a recovery scenario because we thought that was a more realistic picture that took into account both of those things, namely a scenario where the economy recovers quite rapidly and where the long-term impact of Covid relative to the trend is relatively small because the economy has bounced back quite fast. To us, that suggests there will not be as big a long-term impact as we feared at one time. That is essentially good news.

In terms of the pace of recovery, the way to think about it is that this is a timing issue. We were always relatively positive about where the economy was going to end up; it is just that the recovery has happened earlier. That means that we see more of the recovery in 2021 and less in 2022. We get to the same position, but earlier. That is a good thing, but it does not change our view of the long or medium run. It is important to view it as a timing issue.

As the Deputy has noted, we have not done a very detailed analysis of the budget deficit for this year, but, as he reminded us, we think it could be around €15 billion or 7% of national income, which is somewhat less than what was set out in the stability programme update, SPU. It is still a big deficit.

Does Dr. Casey want to add anything specifically about 2022? It obviously depends on decisions taken in the budget. I do not think we have done a very detailed modelling of that. I do not know if there is any additional information he wishes to provide.