Dr. Micheál Collins:

I am happy to come in on this. I strongly encourage Deputy Boyd Barrett and his colleagues to engage further on this and I am delighted to hear him explore it. There is a long list of tax expenditures and they are complex. It raises a question as to how we can assure we can do it without getting buried in it. It is such a big area it could possibly overcrowd the work of the committee. My thinking on the suggestion is that we can categorise tax expenditure into various themes. As we have gone through this today, we have spoken about those related to cultural aspects, corporate aspects and savings in various ways. There might be merit in doing this because agriculture is similar. They begin to sit next to each other and we can see the coherence across them. I acknowledge it is frustrating because one ends up looking at one area conscious that there are a number of others. If members were to proceed down such a route, it would put down a marker that over time each of these would be examined by the Committee on Budgetary Oversight. In a sense, this would increase overall the level of expected scrutiny and actual scrutiny of the expenditure.

There is merit in examining new and recurring issues. Dr. Roantree may wish to speak about it more and about the suggestion the ESRI include in its proposal to the committee of getting the annual reviews that are ongoing from the Department of Finance published in time for the committee to consider them, rather than dropping them with the budget documentation which, as committee members will be aware, is substantial and all arrives in two minutes flat after the Minister sits down having delivered the budget every year. There is a better way to do it. This would also help with the deliberations. Of course, if the Department of Finance can produce such reports, it can produce many other similar reports the committee could look at, request and include in its annual reviews of these areas.