Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)

When the Minister for Finance came in here on budget day last year, he introduced the budget and told us the worst was over. All through the year he has repeated that the worst is over, that we have turned the corner and that the Government's plan is working. As recently as 19 September, in an interview with The Sunday Tribune, he told us we had turned the corner. When he introduced the budget he told us there was a remaining €7.5 billion of budgetary adjustments to be made between last year and 2014. The briefing of Opposition finance spokespersons by Department of Finance officials shows that the figure of €7.5 billion is way wide of the mark. The figure now being discussed and considered is significantly higher than that. The worst is yet to come. I appreciate that not every budgetary figure and projection made by the Minister for Finance on budget day will come in bang on the button. However, the extent to which the projections were completely wrong is utterly astonishing. I do not know anywhere else where the Minister for Finance gives a Budget Statement and within one year the projections within the statement were so seriously out of kilter. How did the Government get the figures so badly wrong?

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