Advisory council: Who they are

Prof John McHale (chairman):McHale is professor and head of economics at the National University of Ireland, Galway. He is on the Pensions Board and is a member of the National Economic and Social Council. He has been an assistant and associate professor of economics at Harvard University and associate professor of managerial economics and Toller family research fellow at Queen's University, Ontario. He has been a consultant to the World Bank. He received PhD and AM degrees from Harvard and holds first-class BComm and MEcon Sc degrees from NUI.

Sebastian Barnes:Barnes is a senior economist at the OECD and head of the EU desk. He is a former head of the Ireland desk, where he co-authored two Economic Surveys of Ireland. He joined the OECD in 2005 from the Bank of England. He holds a bachelor's degree in philosophy, politics and economics from Oxford, a master's in European political economy from the College of Europe (Bruges) and an MSc in economics from the London School of Economics.

Prof Alan Barrett:Barrett is a research professor with Trinity College Dublin where he is the project director with the Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing. He is on secondment from the ESRI. He is a research fellow with the Institute for the Study of Labour in Bonn and is an associate editor of the Economic and Social Review. He was lead author of the ESRI's Quarterly Economic Commentary(2005-2010). He has a PhD in economics from Michigan State University.

Dr Donal Donovan:Donovan is an adjunct professor at UL and a visiting lecturer at Trinity. He was a member of the teams that produced the governor of the Central Bank of Ireland's report in May 2010 and the Nyberg report in April 2011. He is a former IMF staff member. He holds a BA from Trinity and a PhD from the University of British Columbia.

Dr Róisín O'Sullivan:An associate professor in Smith College, Massachusetts, her publications include articles on the impact of the inflation targeting policy framework on bond market volatility. She spent years as an economist in the monetary policy department of the Central Bank of Ireland. She holds a bachelor's and a master's degree from NUIG and has PhD in economics from the Ohio State University