Dr. Eddie Casey:

I will come in on that. The discussion we had in the summer was along the lines of what the temporary spending should be. That is what the Deputy was pushing the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council on and rightly so. We did not want to put a figure on it because much of it depended on how targeted it would be. The worry was that 90% of the cost-of-living measures we saw in the first part of the year were untargeted. Fortunately, the temporary measures introduced in the budget and directed towards households were much more targeted. That was one factor that changed our judgment and assessment of this. Regarding the overall numbers, as it is a temporary amount that only impacts on one year, it was warranted to support households through the crisis. When we examined it, we saw that the inflationary impact was not that great relative to the permanent measures. These issues fed into the assessment that an appropriate balance was struck.