Michael Noonan (Limerick City, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The core of the debate is a valid point being made by Deputy Doherty that our decisions should be evidence-based, that such evidence should apply both to economic factors and to social factors and that we should do our best to position ourselves to form budgets and to introduce finance Bills on that basis. I agree with that proposition. However, in debating the proposition, Deputy Doherty has not referred to the actual budgetary process. The Department of Finance and the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform in the present Administration drive the budget process forward, but all Departments are involved. Many of the issues of equality, fairness and equal treatment to which the Deputy refers are subscribed to by the Department of Social Protection, which has an input into the budget. The social measures are part of the budget and these have a separate Act. The Social Welfare Bill was enacted immediately following the budget before Christmas. That Act is driven by the Department of Social Protection, which takes into consideration all the actions that the Deputy says should be taken, such as the impact on individual groups and families of the changes made.

Deputy Mathews spoke about looking at the whole engineering underpinning of the budget, which is expenditure and tax, but that has been done. One of the first actions taken by the Minister, Deputy Howlin, was to carry out a full review of expenditure. Every Department and every agency was examined and the results were published. The engineering has been examined in detail and there have been various commissions on taxation to examine the detail and the underpinnings on the tax side.

Deputy Doherty, in a previous intervention, suggested that I had pulled the property tax proposal out of a clear blue sky without any analysis of the impact. The property tax proposal was based on the report of the expert group chaired by Dr. Don Thornhill, which we published. The Deputy can read the analysis that was carried out in that report. We are very close to what was reported. We did not accept all the measures but the property tax proposals are very close to the proposals produced by Dr. Thornhill.

The other part of the budgetary process is that we receive very large numbers of submissions, many of which come from voluntary groups who are experts in this regard. I do not have a set of people in my Department who are experts on disability, for example. While that kind of resource is probably available in the Department of Health or in the HSE, it is not available in the Department of Finance. We received more than 1,000 pre-budget submissions, many of which were from voluntary organisations. I met many of the groups but my officials met many more. Therefore, there is a strong input from all of these organisations. I suggest that the voluntary organisations dealing with people with disabilities, who are very supportive of them, are the best people to proof a budget or a finance Bill as to its impact on disabilities. They do this all the time.

Another part of the process which has not been taken into account is the examination by this committee. The job of parliamentarians is to proof the proposals from me and the Government on the grounds of their economic impact and their impact on individual citizens. I agree with the Deputy's proposition that if a budget is not about people it is not worth doing anyway. It is all about people, in the final analysis. There is a much wider process which does a lot of what the Deputy suggests. The tax strategy group does strong work on analysis of tax proposals, and all of its documentation is published after the budget.

I am only disagreeing with the Deputy on quite narrow grounds. Where we consider a study is necessary to decide on the impact, economic and otherwise, we will do it. However, if it is a study for the sake of having a study, which requires a lot of resources and man-hours in the Department, we simply are not that rich in resources. The cuts in numbers in the public service have been applied to the Department of Finance also. We have to deploy resources to get the best results. More than any other Administration, we have carried out a series of economic impact studies. Other Departments are also carrying out studies. One of the emerging debates, which I presume will continue in the course of this year, is with regard to proposals about child benefit. That study was commissioned and published by the Minister for Social Protection. This is the basis for the analysis required by the Deputy. Not everything is channelled through the Department of Finance. I do not disagree in principle. The more transparency there is in these processes, the better and the more democratic our process will be.