Mairead Farrell (Galway West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

There will be on average €10 billion required from 2023 to 2025. Professor McMahon has said that this would be required through either increasing taxation or cutting areas of public spending. In the programme for Government, we see that there is a commitment to index tax credits and bands from 2022 in line with wage inflation of 2% to 3%. The cumulative cost of these tax cuts from 2022 to 2025 is between €2.7 billion and €4 billion. In addition to this, the programme for Government promises a tax cut for people earning over €100,000 at the cost of €123 million a year. Given the fact that the programme for Government has ruled progressive taxation, and Mr. Barnes has said that the adjustment of approximately €10 billion will need to be made by either tax increases or spending cuts, what areas would need to be looked at to make that adjustment, given the €3 billion cost that indexing would have? My deep concern here is that there will be spending cuts in health, housing and childcare but what is Mr. Barnes take on what areas would need to be looked at?