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

No, it is wrong. The Deputy needs to consider the total amount of funding this budget has raised. As he knows, most of the budget day package went into additional expenditure in many areas where the Deputy would welcome it, whether in social welfare or the maintenance and steady growth of a universal child care model to try to tackle the issues surrounding the quality and affordability of child care. That has happened. The Minister for Children and Youth Affairs is in the second year of putting that scheme in place.

In respect of the resilience of the tax-raising measures I have put in place, I reacted to the Deputy's inaccurate assertion that this is a tax-cutting budget. It has reduced personal taxation but it has increased tax in other areas. If the Deputy considers the changes we have made in stamp duty on non-residential commercial property, the total yield of such measures to our tax revenue is less than half of what it was in the pre-crash period. Beside that, we have a rate of expenditure growth which is significantly lower, as the Deputy knows, than the expenditure growth in the pre-crash period. We have broadened our tax base and we have increased expenditure at a rate that is below, from a current point of view, how I expect the economy to grow next year and that is a fraction of the expenditure growth in the period leading up to our economy's crash.