Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I will deal with each of the questions in turn. I will begin with the Government expenditure as a percentage of national income and how Ireland stacks up versus peer countries. I do not accept that Ireland is low in relation to it and this is one of the very reasons I have asked my officials to devote a chapter to this topic in the mid-year expenditure report. Two different factors emerged from the analysis. The first is that Ireland is in a different place from many of the peer countries to whom we were compared, most notably in having two characteristics. First, we are far younger and we do not have the same level of investment in the Army and armed forces as other countries do by virtue of our neutrality and the attitude towards the deployment of our armed forces. The second point of difference is in how we measure our national income. There is a chart laid out on page 14 of that report which I will forward to the Deputy which expresses our national expenditure as a percentage of the gross national income of the State. That analysis shows that Ireland is roughly in the middle of peer countries in how we invest because of the difficulties we have in using GDP as a measurement of national income. That information is there. With regard to the point that the Deputy-----