Neasa Hourigan (Dublin Central, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

It is the Green Party time slot now, so I will focus on the process and the issues we are dealing with in this report. We have been lucky enough over recent weeks, both before the interim report and afterwards, to talk to a number of parliamentarians and the counterparts of the Parliamentary Budget Office in various countries, and a number of issues have emerged which I would like to put to both Ministers.

The first is the issue of a hands-free budget. This came out particularly from discussions with some counterparts in Austria. One of the issues that has come to the fore for us is the timing of the mid-year expenditure report and whether it is too late to allow for a proper budgetary oversight review of that document before the budget process is in place. Linked to this is the treatment of the Finance Bill. I think we can all agree that the Finance Bill properly belongs in the finance committee, but there was a suggestion that we could support some of that work by looking over the course of a year at things such as tax expenditures in order that we might formulate some kind of position on a hands-free budget. I put that to both Ministers. It is the idea of producing a more detailed overview of what a hands-free budget would look like every year.