Professor Michael McMahon:

I would go one step further and highlight a problem. There are occasions, not so much in Ireland but in other countries, where, when entering a recession, governments have wanted to ramp up investment but have not had what we refer to as shovel-ready projects. Having a list, as Dr. Casey referred to, or a national development plan is not a widespread concept, but it is very useful. If everything is lined up and ready to go, and if it is suddenly possible, feasible and sensible to bring the construction of a hospital in a given area up the list because, say, a lot of construction workers are available there or because it makes sense to do it there, we could do that. Where we get into problems is when we say we want to complete these projects and then enter a three-, four- or five-year cycle of planning, trying to agree, locating a site and so on. That would render useless the potential for such a national development plan to stabilise the economy because we would not have the projects ready to go when we could work on them.