Mr. Sebastian Barnes:

I will attend to those points in turn. On the general Government figures, this is an issue that comes up in a lot of countries. Ireland in some ways has better transparency than other countries. We have a fairly precise idea in terms of providing information on the gross spending there and on a number of other things, including a thing called the "walk", which allows one to move from the Exchequer to the general Government figures. There is a clear idea of how to do that. The Department of Finance is looking at it. We look forward to the Department making progress on that issue and hopefully reporting back to the committee on that.

On capital spending, the Deputy is absolutely right. We view capital spending as being very important and it has a very big multiplier. It also has a long-term benefit in increasing the capital base of the economy, providing a framework for structures for public services in the future and, potentially, to support growth. We welcome that this was part of the budget. Deputy Mairéad Farrell is right that the increase allocated in the budget was not huge but we must bear in mind that capital spending in Ireland has been growing very fast in recent years and is now at quite high levels by EU standards. That was very lucky. It takes a lot of time to plan capital spending and it just happened that Ireland was ramping up capital spending at the right time. The right thing to do is look at the level of capital spend during this crisis much more than to look at the change. In the past in Ireland we have seen that capital spending has been slashed during crises. This current situation actually represents progress in moving towards better fiscal policy.

Another issue in the context of capital spending, which we see a little bit from the Exchequer numbers from last week, is delivery. On our assessment it looks that capital spending this year will be less than planned. This raises big questions about delivery for next year also. Maybe the priority should not be to keep making ever-bigger promises about what the spend will be, which I am not sure would be helpful. What would be helpful is to make sure that the money already planned to be spent actually does get spent. The quality of the capital that comes out of this will be very important too.