Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

We have to try to plan. The Minister has given us a 2017 Estimate. One normally gets Estimates in the budget and one can compare 2016 and 2017 and see increases and decreases. This is radically altered. If we got the Revised Estimates volume in the normal form, all of these would show up for 2016, and we would be able to see whether there was a real increase in 2017 over what the Minister actually spent in 2016 as opposed to the Estimate for 2016. For example, I do not think there is €7.5 million in CLÁR for next year. This means that this year's CLÁR figure is bigger the next year's CLÁR figure, given that the Minister has just announced that €7.5 million is to be spent between now and the end of the year in CLÁR.

In the next day or two, in order that we can tease it out further, could we get a revised Revised Estimate for 2016, which I had hoped we would get today, showing these ups and downs and giving a much more accurate indication of what the likely outturn for 2016 is going to be? This is what one normally would get in a Revised Estimate volume in order that we can compare it to what has been allocated for 2017 and assess the adequacy of 2017 against it.