Mr. Seamus Coffey:

I echo what Mr. Tutty said. We are not absolutists when it comes to overruns. The Government's budget is very large and we do not expect every line to match the amounts set out at the start of the year. We focus on the overall amount. The issue in health is the systematic nature of these overruns that happen every year but in a budget this large there will be some items that are higher and some that are lower. We would expect that the overall aggregate would be close to what was set out at the start and that we should be able to accommodate those through one form or another. To some extent that happened last year. The overall amount of expenditure did not increase dramatically last year and what we have this year are Supplementary Estimates in health and a range of other areas and they are all adding to the full amount of spending and there are almost no savings elsewhere. Some variation in the budget is fine but the issue we have with health is the systematic nature of the repeated overruns and the fact that this year, by and large the additional spending is added into the total for 2018 and becomes part of the base for 2019.