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

When we received the September Exchequer returns on the night of the last day of that month, we saw that, while there had not been a jump similar to August's figures, the levels were being sustained. More than €900 million extra had been collected in tax in 2014 by that point. That trend is continuing, thankfully.

There was significant non-tax revenue notified to me at the very end by the National Treasury Management Agency, NTMA, and the Central Bank. The latter applied a condition to some of its extra profits, namely, capital gains tax, and we were not able to use them for budgetary measures. We simply took them off the debt. There were moving parts right to the end.