Mr. Sebastian Barnes:

Useful for our work, but in an indirect way. Our concern is fiscal sustainability. Different combinations of tax and spending are possible. The concern for us is that people are reluctant to raise taxes even though they want better services, and they are probably going to have to spend more anyway because of ageing and climate issues. This leads to a mismatch where people take risks with the public finances because they cannot increase revenue. As Dr. Casey said, it is important to have a good set of options on the table. We have taken the Commission on Taxation and Welfare's excellent work and done bottom-up and top-down exercises. In our paper, we recognise that these exercises were rough and ready based on the information we had. This is a technical job. The Government should set aside resources to provide a proper assessment of the data that it has access to and we do not. This would allow better options to be put on the table, the council would benefit because a better conversation on what could be done could be held, and Ireland would not get into a position where our tax base was too small relative to the level of spending we wanted, leading to fiscal trouble.