Dr. Seán Healy:

We sent the link to the document to the secretariat; therefore, the committee should have it. We can provide hard copies for anyone who is interested in having one. We acknowledge fully the increase in public investment in the budget generally. We also acknowledge the increase in expenditure in the overall budget. However, what we are saying is Ireland has a very low level of public investment compared to other European countries. We have one of the lowest, particularly when we think about our peers in the EU15, and not counting Lithuania, Bulgaria and such places. If we look at the EU15, we have a much lower level of public investment annually and we are very concerned about this. We have been concerned about it for several years. We did a briefing some years ago, which showed that at that point we had the lowest level of public investment. What worried us - we pointed it out at the time - was not that we had the lowest, which was bad enough, but that if we doubled our investment at that time we would still have had the lowest level of investment in the European Union. We are very concerned that if we do not put in the investment now, we will store up problems for ourselves down the line. We fully acknowledge that we must stay within fiscal parameters, although we suggest they should be renegotiated and we have suggested ways of doing this. We also suggest there are ways of having special purpose vehicles for dealing with housing, and social housing in particular, because we consider it to be a one-off expenditure that urgently needs to be done. We believe agreement could be got for this.

With regard to the Department of Health, what we are speaking about is straightforward enough. The first issue has to do with the overrun. The director general of the HSE told an Oireachtas committee before the budget that he was heading in that direction. When we look at the numbers in the health budget, we do not see where the money is and, therefore, we conclude it is not there.