Dara Calleary (Mayo, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister and his officials. I apologise in advance for having to leave early as I have another commitment at 5 p.m. I will start where the Minister finished on the issue of public service pay. He made an announcement this morning of €120 million of extra expenditure and immediately prior to Christmas, there was €50 million expenditure for the Garda deal. There are a few questions around that. That €50 million was split between €25 million from the budget of the Department of Justice and Equality and €25 million from the general budget. Will the same formula apply across all Departments for the €120 million extra expenditure that was announced this morning? Can the Minister give a guarantee that services will not be affected in any way by the Garda expenditure allocation or the extra expenditure allocation announced this morning? Is the €120 million announced this morning included Revised Estimates for 2017.

The Minister said that "pay increases are negotiated fairly and budgeted for on a multi-annual basis" in relation to Lansdowne Road and we all agree with that, but what we have had in the past few months have been pay agreements on the hoof, to a certain extent, and since the introduction of the budget he has managed to find €170 million effectively out of nowhere. He said in his press conference that it will be found from general savings and efficiencies. That is one very big sofa if it has €170 million down the back of it.

The role of this committee is budget scrutiny and if €170 million can be found on the hoof, that makes our job as a committee very difficult. An independent budget office, the putting in place of which is our aim and which will be established this year, will surely not approve of that kind of action. The Minister will not be able to do that under the new fiscal rules. How will this or any Government envisage that kind of expenditure in light of the new fiscal rules environment and in light of us being empowered and able to do the job the Oireachtas has given us as a scrutiny committee?

Will the Minister outline the process and timelines for the capital review and the spending review? Before the Minister arrived, Deputy Cullinane proposed that we would do some work on the fiscal rules around capital expenditure. Given the commitments the Minister has entered into and the spending commitments in the budget and subsequent to it, what will be the revised fiscal space, to use those dreaded words, for 2017, 2018 and 2019? In the context of the Minister going down the road of having a capital review, where is the space within the existing fiscal rules for us to have an active and aggressive capital investment programme, which we all agree we need? Given that those rules are so restrictive, has the Minister engaged with the European Commission around those rules? Has he responded to their entreaties? President Juncker and others have said that there needs to be flexibility? Has Ireland engaged in that process of flexibility around capital expenditure? We saw the director general of the HSE at the weekend look for an extra €9 billion in capital expenditure for the health service. I am sure if every other director general and Secretary General had the opportunity, they would be doing something similar.

What is the Minister's expectation for the comprehensive spending review? His predecessor would have completed that probably on two or three different occasions during his time in the Department or one would have hoped he would have. In the context of the expenditure cuts that were engaged in during that time, one would assume that every cent was accounted for. The Minister made the suggestion in his opening statement that he hopes out of the spending review to find additional resources for spending and for programmes, and to add to the fiscal space. That is what I understood him to say. Can he outline the timeline for the spending review and what kind of figure he has in mind that may be achieved from it?