Mr. Sebastian Barnes:

I think so. Obviously, in a parliamentary system such as the Oireachtas, we could always pass another law that would outlaw it, but it would be more costly because the Government would have to put up its hand and say it was passing a law to break the spending law. The idea is that we would specify these kinds of details and would be more committed to it because we would have to write it down. When the budget was being passed, it would have to comply with that requirement and that is where it would become more binding.

There were two points I wanted to make for context. The Chair mentioned one but not the other. She pointed out that the rule was broken quickly. Over recent years, we have seen quite a lot of initiatives from the Government regarding different fiscal rules and there have been two or three debt rules in the past five years that came and went, but we see here a real commitment to it that we have not seen previously. Unfortunately, this was the worst possible year in some ways to introduce a debt rule, when the rate of inflation was so high. Despite that, however, it has helped the Government guide its policies at a time when there was a kind of economic storm that could have led to much higher permanent increases and so on without the Government thinking about that. Instead, it had a benchmark and, sensibly, it would have been very disruptive to stick to the 5%, but it stuck quite closely to it. This is kind of the direction the EU rules, as proposed by the Commission, are going in. There is also good reason to think this is a direction in which it would make sense for Ireland to go because it is the general direction in which we are going to have go in any event.