Mr. Sebastian Barnes:

That it does not work is the short way of putting it. There is that concern, about what the technical requirement is. The second thing that is important for context is that the 0.5% requirement was in the existing framework as well. The 0.5% requirement is a tiny fiscal adjustment compared to the Irish experience of austerity and can be achieved by, for example, not raising public sector wages and freezes in most countries, particularly in an environment with quite high inflation. So it is a very different animal from that. It does become more problematic for countries that have to do it for several years in a row. It becomes much more challenging on the fiscal side and it is a big drain on an economy that is growing more slowly. However, it is important to understand that this adjustment is different from what our past experience of adjustment has been. In some ways if one is concerned about fiscal sustainability, high debt, and bad debt dynamics in some of these countries maybe that comes into the trade-off. We are not taking a view as to whether this is the right trade-off. Maybe it should not have included these changes maybe it should, I do not know. It is weighing up these different factors at a European level. There are trade-offs involved but the 0.5% in itself does not correspond to the austerity we knew in this country when the council was set up.