Pearse Doherty (Donegal South West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I support the proposal before the committee. I welcome the Minister's response. The devil is in the detail with these issues. I welcome the Minister's assurance that a version of the presentation will be made available to the committee. The committee will get all of this information anyway. Like the public and the Dáil, we get it on budget day. It is a question of when we get it and how we get it. That is the problem. This proposal opens up a debate about how we deal with our budgetary process and what is expected of Opposition parties when they make budget proposals. Representatives of various sectors of society will address this committee today. All of us are in the dark regarding the overall aggregate consolidation that is to be undertaken by this Government and will be submitted to the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council. The suggestion that the Department of Finance provides a service to Opposition parties is a myth. The independent costing of budget proposals does not exist. It is up to this committee to expose such myths. If there is a requirement for a budget document to be independently assessed by the Department of Finance, such a facility should be made available. It is not available at present. We have been trying to ask for it since June of this year. The answer we have received from the Department in recent weeks is "We are under serious pressure, and can you please prioritise the measures you would like to be costed?". They do not provide a facility of this nature. This motion goes to the core of the matter. The first thing Opposition parties, society and the public need to know is what the forecasts are based on. There is no point in providing those forecasts on the day of the budget when the policy is announced. We should have the technical forecasts and the aggregate consolidations now so that we can contribute to the policy debate in the weeks coming up to the budget.