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

That IBEC has not addressed where the savings will come from is a fundamental flaw in its proposals. Items such as a reduction in social welfare payments as a result of an increase in employment could have been used to back up IBEC's proposal. I suspect IBEC does have some ideas of where savings could be made.

Do the witnesses agree with the requirement for an overall adjustment of €2 billion? I would welcome a response from each witness to that question. The target for last year's budget was €3.2 billion. However, the Minister for Finance, Deputy Noonan, when introducing the budget, announced that taxation measures and expenditure adjustments amounted to approximately €2.6 billion and thus he needed to make only €600 million of non-tax or expenditure adjustments. In terms of the €2 billion adjustment this year, in the witnesses' view, is it possible that double that amount could be found this year? How, in their view, should the deficit adjustment be met, taking into account that some of the adjustments last year were in relation to items that did not come under the heading of taxation or expenditure? Perhaps Dr. O'Connor would respond first to that question.