Professor David Farrell:

It goes back to the Westminster tradition, the notion that it is the government's budget. Effectively, there is a default notion that it is the government's budget and, therefore, it should be kept under tight wraps until the very moment that it is released and that is the way it is done. As I tried to suggest earlier, in more consensus-based democracies, particularly in the north European cases, it is inbuilt in the DNA of politicians and civil servants who work in those systems to have an open government. Plus, there should be a much greater awareness of the underlying macroeconomic assumptions that lead towards to the budget. There should be much greater potential to scrutinise, in detail, the assumptions that lead towards what will be produced on budgetary day. As part of the mix, a budgetary office that comes under the remit of the Oireachtas is one way to address the matter. Those are the sort of areas where I suggest one could improve things.