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

Yes. I have now been participating in debates like this for three years and I have never sat in front of this committee while somebody called on me to run larger surpluses. That has not happened. In my many years participating in debates like this, I have never had a single politician calling on me to spend less. The reason is that it is my job to get the balance right because I have the privilege of being a Minister. If we are going to have a debate on whether we should be running larger surpluses now, I am well up for that debate. Of course, I will ask anybody participating in any of the budget day debates to point to where I had been asked to run larger surpluses or smaller deficits.

More broadly, taking in rates of Government expenditure over the past number of years, the cumulative rate of growth in current expenditure over the past five years was 19%. Between 2004 and 2009, it was 57%. That is the level of difference in comparing now and then. There are 2.3 million people at work in the complete absence of the private sector lending boom that last time was needed to create that rate of employment. I look at where we are overall in our national finances and the broader health of our economy and we are in a very different place to where we were a decade ago.