Mr. Sebastian Barnes:

I agree with my colleagues. We have not done a detailed comparative study of Ireland’s administrative capacity compared to other countries. Part of this is the political commitment. A concern I had about the budget was that expenditure seems to have been pushed up again. That is not about administrative capacity. Someone has taken a decision somewhere and it is an important one.

Reading through the budget, I got a feeling of a lack of ownership about some of the fiscal rules. There was much discussion about the EU fiscal rules which come from Brussels. There was little discussion about the domestic budgetary rule or the domestic expenditure ceiling framework. If people are serious about the framework, there needs to be that buy-in and a willingness to reference to domestic rules. It is also important to state these are good rules which will be taken seriously. Instead, they were really downplayed in the budget documentation. That raises a question about the will to implement it and not about the capacity of civil servants to make a particular system work.