Lisa Chambers (Mayo, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank Mr. Coffey and all of his team. As always, we welcome the engagement. Other members and I place a lot of weight on the advice provided to the committee by the council. I have concerns that perhaps the Minister does not place enough weight on what the council says on the basis that the advice over recent years appears to have been, for the most part, ignored and not acted upon.

Mr. Tutty's said that Governments spent money in the good times and had not run up surpluses when they could have done, and that we should build up reserves in the good times so we can adopt counter-cyclical measures when we need them. It appears that we are now at a point where the Government thinks we might need them but it is not in a position to do so. This is deeply disappointing. It seems the Government has not learned from the mistakes of the past. It regularly refers to the mistakes of the past for other purposes but it does not seem to want to learn from them, which is most unfortunate for the country.

When do Mr. Coffey and his team believe the Government would have been in a position to start running surpluses and in what year did the council first advise to do that? How many years could surpluses have been run?