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

I will pick up on Deputy McGrath's point. The Minister has given us a timeline, and the information that was available at the end was not available in June or July. We appreciate that; it is not the issue. Seven days before the budget was announced, Deputy McGrath and I had to use our priority questions on the floor of the Dáil to try to elicit some information. The Minister said we were not to hold him to it, but that it would be a broadly neutral budget with a scope of about €50 million to €100 million. That was seven days before the budget was announced. Three days later, at midnight on Friday, the White Paper came out showing that there was scope to hit the 3% target with about €1.1 billion. I find it very difficult to believe that the Minister for Finance was not aware this type of scope existed. Was it just a pleasant surprise at midnight on Friday? I do not believe it.

When I look at what was in the newspapers in the weeks leading up this, and this is based on leaks so we will just take the information for what it is, it was very clear that the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, Deputy Howlin, was suggesting that there would be scope of €400 million, which ended up being roughly what was in the budget. The rest was taxation measures. The point is that it is very difficult when both Opposition finance spokespersons are looking for information, and within 72 hours, the information comes out and it is completely different from what was suggested on the floor of the Dáil, all within seven days of the budget being announced. That is really difficult. We cannot wind back the clock but we need to come up with a better, more fit-for-purpose system of trying provide information to the Opposition. There seems to be a culture of not letting anybody know and of having the big bang on budget day, as it were, like in the past when the Minister for Finance would give his speech and not even the Cabinet would know what he was going to announce. We are not in those days any more but it is very much clouded in secrecy. We simply could not get the information that was required.