Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein)
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I thank the witnesses for their contributions. They are very interesting and timely. There are a lot of commonalities in what they have said. IFAC's submission makes for stark reading. We would be in a deficit of more than €5 billion if it was not for the windfall tax. This is difficult for people to understand. It would suggest there has not been good management of the economy if we are totally reliant on three big corporations. What if they were to go tomorrow? It seems like very precarious management of the economy in this sense.

We have this on one hand and then NERI has stated recessions are inevitable so we need to be cognisant of the structural position. It states we could be running a €5 billion deficit but whatever happens we will have a recession sometime in the future. The question is how we protect against this and what type of infrastructure we invest in. Again the commonality all of the witnesses share is the housing crisis and what needs to be done with regard to housing, and not alone housing as infrastructure. Housing has to be fixed.

My first question is for Dr. McDonnell of NERI. What type of infrastructure do we need to invest in?