Professor Michael McMahon:

We have not done anything specific on childcare costs. I will resort to my earlier answer, which is that I think policies to alleviate supply constraints on the economy and in the various dimensions that they exist, including labour supply, would be beneficial. However, the devil is always in the detail with those specific policies and what they would address.

On the second question, the argument that we have made for a number of years is that there is a concentration risk. As the Chair pointed out, the figure that used to be cited was about the top ten firms. Based on the secretariat's recent work, within that, which is already concentrated, it is even more concentrated. With that concentrated risk there is a desire for diversification.

There are two main points I would like to draw out from what the Deputy said. One is that the risk of a change in the international tax environment or some behaviours of these firms will mean that what we assess to be the excess no longer comes. That is on top of but also separate from a more normal cyclical risk that could go on. When we talk about the excess, we are not typically talking about that cyclical risk. When we mention this concentration in certain sectors, particularly tech and pharmaceuticals and tech is the one in the headlines at the moment, we might worry about some of those firms not because of worldwide activities that bring in corporate tax revenues, but because many of them have large operations in Ireland and are responsible for many salaries often at the top rate of tax. If they were to downturn, there is not just the corporation tax element to that downturn, there would also be the jobs and income tax take element.

In that sense a prudent policy that we propose is to save these revenues. While we are not here to advise on the exact mechanism, I think the committee has explored something along the lines of how Norway and other commodity-based economies save their revenues and invest them abroad. That is a different form of diversification. They are diversifying by committing not to invest their sovereign wealth funds in the domestic economy and then to take the flow income from that investment and use that as the-----