Alan Barrett

the new job.

So that's always a worry and we're obviously vulnerable to that.

And then you can have these sort of situations that say, for example, if you have people who are coming onto the labour market at a particular point in time, if they're in a sense victims of that changeover, if you start the labour, you know, your career in a bad situation, it can actually sort of follow you for quite a long time.

So you have those difficulties.

But the additional problem in Ireland is the following.

We could fall into the trap that we have job destruction in Ireland

But the job positives could be elsewhere.

OK, so if you think about the Irish economy.

At the moment, we absolutely are.

But just given the nature of the Irish economy, where we have such a strong foreign direct investment base here, where you have activities, some activities being done here and other activities being done elsewhere.

And this was one of the questions I brought to my ESRI colleagues because they were essentially sort of saying, well, that in Ireland in general, you could see a loss of income as a result.

And I sort of asked the question, well, why would you have a loss of income?

I mean, if this is positive and negative,

And the answer potentially was this idea that we could suffer the job losses without necessarily, certainly in the short term, getting the plus.

Not to add to the depression on a bank holiday weekend.

But we continually in Ireland talk about the fragility of the corporation tax base.

OK, but this was pointed out to me sort of quite a while ago, theoretically.

And again, it's one of these things that's now coming onto the agenda in a more practical sense.

These are also high taxpayers.

And so to the extent that that fragility is there.