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

Any changes we make will be sustainable, affordable and in line with the kind of changes we made last year. Deputy Broughan began to outline what I am planning to do with expenditure, but if he looks at what I am doing, he will see that the key driver for our expenditure growth for next year is investment in capital expenditure: hospitals, schools, and homes. I think that the Deputy will agree with me on this. Looking at where we are with regard to current expenditure, much of the expenditure growth we have elsewhere is on profile and in line with how the economy is growing, the pressure on the health sector and one other exception notwithstanding.

I will deal with the charge that I am in some way looking to be unsustainable by illustrating the scale of how different we are now as opposed to the past. In budgets deployed across the so-called tiger period, the combined value of the tax and social welfare packages amounted at one point to between €1.6 billion and €2.6 billion. The combined value of any package that I have put before the Dáil has amounted to between €800 million and a maximum of €1 billion. Both expenditure growth and income and social welfare packages are considerably lower than they were in the past. The Taoiseach was correct in his broad outline of where it is we are going, and I will be filling out this outline between now and budget day.