Prof Martina Lawless

So where we see that impact is a larger decline

up to a 3.2%.

Actually, a similar decline in GNI star, a slightly more moderate decline in consumption and household income.

But in any event, pretty much all of the substantial risks that we see to the Irish economy over the 10-year horizon really come from external factors because we're so reliant on trade and an open global economy for our economic success.

Yes, that's the third of the sort of risk scenarios that we look at is that there would be a decline in investment and employment in those multinational sectors.

And we see that reducing GNI Star by about one and a half percent.

The multinationals are very important in a fiscal sense.

They're very important to GDP, but because they're mostly foreign companies, there's slightly less of a direct impact on GNI Star.

Yeah, so on the slightly more kind of positive scenarios, there's been a longstanding discussion of sort of a dual economy structure in Ireland, whereas the foreign multinationals are much more productive.

They've got a lot more capital investment than the domestic Irish firms.

So we look at what the overall economic impact of slightly closing that gap would be over time.

So something like if the various policy initiatives that the Department of Enterprise put out in their competitiveness strategy earlier this year

increasing R&D, increasing skills in the domestic economy.

And we would see that could increase GNI star by about 1.1% by 2030 over the rate that it would otherwise be at that point.

So quite substantial returns to investing in the indigenous sector of the economy, which would also, along with the economic returns, would increase the resilience of the economy because a lot of the risks we focus on are because that FDI sector,

You know, it's very important.

It contributes a lot to the Irish economy, but it is a relatively small number of firms and that leaves exposure to sort of individual firm risk.

Yeah, so that Accelerating Infrastructure Task Force had a kind of a wide range of actions that I think would be really useful in getting that infrastructure delivery moving along.

We didn't specifically model infrastructure, but I think when we talk about that competitiveness risk, the lack of infrastructure is really probably one of the main drivers that we were thinking of.

in terms of what would make the Irish cost base higher and what would potentially make us less attractive as a location for multinationals, either because of restrictions on the water and electricity infrastructure or because of increased costs of electricity.