Michael McGrath (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

What is published in the budget booklet is helpful in so far as it goes but it is not the complete picture. Not only does it take into account all the expenditure adjustments but it takes into account some of them on the social welfare side. As the Minister indicated, child benefit is included in the eight examples given this year but it does not take into account measures that are preannounced. I made the point last year that the doubling of the property tax was not included in the booklet because it was not part of budget 2014 so technically the Minister was correct; it was not part of the measures announced on budget day. It had already been legislated for.

Similarly, the increase in the student contribution charge was laid out some years ago and everybody knew there would be a €250 increase. Those measures are not taken into account. The analysis is scattered and one would have to look at a number of different reports to try to pull it all together and draw some conclusions as to the overall impact of the budget on different sections of society. I do not want to impose a huge bureaucratic burden on officials but there must be a way of pulling together the different strands of data already available and presenting them in a coherent and cohesive way.