Mr. Seamus Coffey:

The monthly receipts are something we keep an eye on. Corporation taxes tend to be highly volatile, even more so on a monthly basis. It is, therefore, hard to identify anything from a number of months of data. In general, we hope that the setting of fiscal policy and the discussion of fiscal policy would move away from whether corporation tax is up or down. We should put fiscal policy on a sustainable and sound footing. Reducing the space available for tax cuts because corporation tax is down is something we do not want to hear. Spending overruns in certain Departments being masked by corporation tax outperformance is something we do not want to hear either. We would like to see a move away from the emphasis on corporation tax and its impact on fiscal policy. We would like to discuss what the sustainable rate of spending growth we can manage in Ireland is, rather than being reliant on this one highly volatile tax head.