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

Well, first of all, it's part of the budgetary process. And, you know, again, going back to the fiscal rules, when we balance the budget in two years' time or maybe sooner, then there's a discretion across the business cycle on the structural deficit to go plus or minus half a per cent. So that's the basic rule and, you know, I intend to adhere to that.

On ... yes, one has to make an assessment then, but budgets now have to be submitted to the European Commission and they examine them to see are there incidental windfall sources of revenue which are being built into the base when they can only be used once and they'll object very strongly to that. And they have done it with other countries, so we don’t do that. The Central Bank keeps an eye on it as well. There were significant capital gains last year on the sale of Government paper that underpinned the promissory note and Patrick wrote to me saying, "This has to come off the debt. You can't use this for budgetary purposes." So we took - whatever it was - €400 million off the debt.

So there are a number of procedures now which are built into the system. So it's not easy anymore to use transactional ... or sorry, incidental windfall stuff for budgetary purposes. You can use it obviously in the one year. You know, if you'd a project, you could use it within the year, but something that goes into the base for subsequent years, you wouldn't use it.