Mr. Gerard Brady:

I will start with the last one on the infrastructure plan. We have said that as new fiscal rules come in for this budget, there should be a target for a minimum spend on infrastructure put into the fiscal rules alongside all the other rules. The biggest challenge we have had that has resulted in the deficits in housing and underpinning infrastructure is that every time we have any slowdown in the economy, the public capital budgets get cut. The most important thing is that we do not this again, if there is any slowdown in tax revenues. We need to protect public capital budgets above everything else, including tax and current spending.

If we look at the other areas, the multi-annual funding is probably the most important side on the infrastructure to make sure that bodies are able to carry that through. The reforms of the planning laws that are already happening will help in future years. The resourcing of the system is also very important.

On fiscal resilience and the corporation tax revenue, Ireland is not in dire risk right now of a correction in corporation tax receipts. In fact, next year, I expect that we will get a lot more corporation tax because we are increasing the rate to 15%. At the moment, the effective rate is probably around 10%. That is a big jump in the effective rate of tax on the same base. The big challenge for us is that we are very vulnerable if anything were to happen on the tax. We have said that we need to try to balance the books as if we just had the corporation tax of a normal globalised, open economy, like the Netherlands or Switzerland. That will have to be done over the course of many years. It means that budgets will have to be a bit tighter and we will need to make sure that if the vulnerability did arise, we would be able to offset it.

On the weaker dollar, more than half of our exports are in dollars, which is the highest of any European economy. That is mostly from US multinationals that are exporting in dollars because they use dollars within the group. The weaker dollar has had a big impact on businesses selling into the US in the first half of the year. We are seeing a slowdown in a number of sectors. The whiskey sector is 90% mothballed, or fully closed, because they produced to get ahead of the tariffs. The sector is now effectively shut because the demand is not there. The engineering sector is very exposed on tariffs. As I said, parts of the engineering sector are not facing 15% but rather 50% tariffs, particularly in agricultural and industrial machinery and other areas where there is a lot of steel in the product. Of the other sectors, medical device manufacturing is probably the largest of the sectors where we see a slowdown.

What we have seen in terms of the labour market slowdown, apart from our own surveys, is that part-time employment is starting to drop off. This is usually a signal that there is a weaker labour market. The applications for work permits and processed work permits are significantly down, because there is less demand for them. This too is a sign that the labour market is slowing. We will have a new economic outlook publication out this week. It shows a slowdown in the pace of employment growth. It is not that we are going backwards in terms of employment; rather, the pace at which we have been expanding will slow over the next few years. Last year, we added 2.7% to employment. Next year, we think it will be well under 2% or thereabouts. It is still expanding but at a slower pace because of the uncertainty and the focus on cost.