Jim Power

And of course, the full impact of the government's emergency package in the face of those protests a few weeks back, a few weeks back.

Excuse me.

A little bit of it was captured in April, but the bulk of it will be captured in the May data.

So we're still spending aggressively here.

No, and actually, Chris, that brings an interesting...

thought to my mind I've been thinking about this a lot over the last couple of days you know the finance minister here Simon Harris took over from Pascal Donoghue when Pascal moved to the World Bank so Simon Harris is the finance minister he's also the leader of the Fine Gael party

And to me, there is just one hell of a massive conflict of interest here, because obviously, as leader of the Fine Gael party, Simon Harris, very focused on the opinion polls and ultimately the poll that matters the next election.

So getting Fine Gael's vote up, that's his primary interest.

And at the same time, as finance minister,

there's a there's a huge huge contradiction here i think i'm amazed there hasn't been a lot more talk about it conflict of interest is how i would describe it it is not good for the public finances and proper management of the public finances so it just leads to populist management of government expenditure particularly so

Do you have a view on it?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

There's no doubt about it.

Personally, I think that the person I had on the podcast a couple of weeks back, Peter Bourke, he should be finance minister at the moment.

Right, Chris, good to talk.

We've exhausted everything, I think, at this stage.

I know you're going to be on your way back from France to Wales, to Plaid Cymru, or however you pronounce it over there.

Have a good trip back, and I look forward to our next podcast when you're back on Terra Firma.

Cheers, Jim.

Thanks a lot, mate.