Mr. Sebastian Barnes:

Again, we are economists so we tend to think about the appropriate range of things. There was a level of public investment, and we warned about this ten years ago, that was too low and clearly damaging to the economy. You could also go crazy on public investment in a way that would definitely not yield good value for money and would push up investment. Then there is the area in between. Where we are is the area in between and the national development plan is the Government's assessment of what it wants to do.

From our point of view, that did not raise particular red flags in terms of sustainability but we did warn that it could have inflationary consequences. As Dr. Casey said, from an overall macro perspective, the economy is going to have a bit less pressure than expected and less private demand, so we are a bit more comfortable with that but then the price pressures have been strong in that sector also. There is a range of policies that are appropriate and I think every country is going through this on the climate side. Future public investment will just have to be much higher than it has been in the past.

We have new technology and renewable technologies are much more capital intensive than what we have seen before. We need to redo our electricity grids, we need to change where we generate electricity and a lot of things, and even in terms of home efficiency, there are huge measures to be taken. How to ramp that historic increase in investment is a difficult question and we do not know the answer. The Government is probably finding its way also and it is not for us to assess whether they are doing that in a perfect way or not as we do not know. It is actually a very big change. We should not underestimate the scale of that increase in investment coming off the back of very low investment in Ireland.