Mr. Sebastian Barnes:

That is a very good question. In terms of the budgetary issues we look at, the Government support mechanisms have overall been very successful. At one time early in the crisis we really feared there would be massive lasting damage to the economy. We have not seen that partly because some sectors were not affected in the end but also because Government supports were so strong both in Ireland and internationally, they really protected people's incomes, jobs and businesses. That has not been the case for everyone but overall the size of the measures has been very successful. It shows how important it is to start with public finances in good shape so that governments can afford to do that. Some countries were not able to be quite so generous, particularly poorer countries, including even in Europe, because their finances did not go into this in such good shape.

There is another positive message that comes back to the earlier question about modelling. Technically, we have learned quite a lot. Earlier Dr. Casey was talking about looking at sectoral patterns to look at income taxes. That is probably something we should have done anyway but we never did because it was never a huge issue. Now we have developed those techniques we can look at it. It is the same with much of what we call nowcasting, with the credit card data that is being used to monitor the economy, for example. We used to look at the national accounts every quarter but now we can look at it week to week. There are some positive things that has come out of this. Even on a much more modest scale, there are some lessons to be learned.