Mr. Seamus Coffey:

Our original position is that we should try to avoid the situation in the first place and that appropriate budgets should be set out across all areas to avoid repeated instances of ceilings being increased during the year they are introduced. If there are issues with the recurring nature of it, perhaps it should be clearly set out in a more coherent fashion.

It is hard to pinpoint one-off or temporary increases in spending within the Department of Health. If it is driven by increases in recruitment, population or demand, a fairly safe assumption would be that a large part of them are recurring.

On the second question and the heat map introduced in this pre-budget statement by the council, we are delighted this innovation is having an impact. On the point regarding houses and housing completions and whether they would show up as a red light within this, the warning from the council is that housing output and construction is a potential source of overheating in the economy. What is shown on the map is the current forecast as set out by the Department of Finance, which shows relatively modest and stable increases in housing output over the next four to five years. The level in 2017 of 15,000 new housing units completed will increase in stages of three or four thousand each year out to 2021-2022 to reach 30,000 units, which the Department considers to be the equilibrium for State housing output. The council's fear is that housing output could reach a tipping point and could increase much faster than that. While the forecasts might be for stable and steady rises, given the nature of the housing sector and the cyclicality built into it there is potential for housing output to rise much more rapidly. While that might look fairly benign right now it is something that should be monitored in terms of commencement data and more reliable completions data. While it looks as if construction is not generating overheating concerns this will remain the case only if there are steady increases over a four or five year period. If we do reach a tipping point where housing output increases rapidly, given the labour intensity of it and the tax richness of it, we would see difficulties arising.