Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 14 November 2012

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform

Scrutiny of EU Legislative Proposals.

3:45 pm

Mr. John Palmer:

Absolutely. Once the regulation is adopted the Minister and the Government will have to decide exactly how they want to satisfy the requirements of the regulation. As I have said there is a wide range of models ranging from the UK where the office of budget responsibility took out of the Treasury the entire macroeconomic forecasting and made it independent. That is one approach and potentially a way we could go. Alternatively, we could go with an independent body, endorsing it. More than likely we would be looking at the fiscal council but that is a decision to be made. Under the Fiscal Responsibility Bill, as Mr. Tony Gallagher said in his statement, the fiscal council already has, on a non-statutory basis, a function of assessing our forecasts. That is what the Bill provides for. We did not want to pre-empt the adoption of this regulation by putting in anything else there.

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