Simon Harris

economic forecast for the country.

I've also asked that the chief economist would commission another piece of work to look at corporation tax.

How much do we think is, let's call it sticky versus non-sticky?

In other words, how much is here likely to be here for the future?

How much could be moved or lost more easily in the time ahead?

And I do think it's important that we continue to analyse that.

But, you know, every finance minister the world over has a set of challenges.

I'd much rather have the set of challenges as to how do we spend additional resources or indeed save additional resources or invest additional resources, rather than what my counterpart in the UK had to do, which was bring in a much smaller package of supports and had to borrow on the market and was charged 5% for the privilege.

So surplus isn't a dirty word.

It's actually an asset that can be deployed for our country.

So I have to push back on this a little bit in terms of vague promises.

I was invited to give a speech on the European economy and where I saw things at the weekend in Dublin and I gave a lengthy speech and in that I made the point, and I believe this very strongly, that no government, including my own by the way, are doing nearly enough when it comes to actually looking at how we can structurally reduce energy costs.

So we saw after the war in Ukraine started, everybody said, we'll never see ourselves in this position again.

And now for the second time in half a decade, we have a fossil fuel price crisis.

So I made the point that we have to look at how we can incentivize people even more to do the right thing.

And I think that's a statement of the blinding obvious.

We've made good changes in the weeks only gone by.

Dara O'Brien has brought about some very good measures that we've seen, I think, 29,000 people applying quarter one.

But are we going to have to go further and do more?

We are, because there's still some people that aren't putting off.