Seán Fleming (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The Departments should be able to give an estimate. If it is part of the budgetary arithmetic, as the Minister has suggested, why not put it into the voted expenditure? The point I am making is that its being an EU treaty obligation does not mean it cannot be in the voted expenditure. Do other countries have a separate central fund? Perhaps the Minister does not know the answer to that question. The voted expenditure in the Dáil is 80% of Government expenditure. The other 20% of it goes through a non-voted mechanism. Are other parliaments side-stepped to the same extent as the Irish Parliament? Does the Minister have any knowledge of that? If he does not, it is okay. I can ask somebody to find that out for me. It is kind of strange. The amount of non-voted expenditure that is paid out of the Central Fund without any reference to the Dáil each year, which is approximately 20% at present, could be as low as 10% if we are not paying the national debt, while it could be as high as 35% in another period, depending on levels of debt and EU commitments. There is something wrong if up to a third of total taxpayer expenditure can be voted through in that manner under this mechanism. It did not happen this year or last year, but it could easily happen. If the Minister knows what the practice is in other countries, that is well and good. If not, we will find it out separately.

I will conclude by speaking about the Department of Finance. Obviously, I did not get the advantage of the briefing that Deputy Donnelly received.