Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 22 September 2021

Committee on Budgetary Oversight

Pre-Budget 2022 Scrutiny: Irish Fiscal Advisory Council

Mr. Sebastian Barnes:

To add to Dr. Casey’s point, and I now have the tables open, if we look at spending in 2023, it is exactly the same. This is really a timing issue. We have to be careful with the notion about the strength of the recovery as it is really about the timing of the recovery. It is obviously a good thing if that happens earlier but we essentially get to the same point. From an economic perspective, the temporary measures over the past few years have been really important to the economy. When we think about the medium-term public finances, they are not so important because we essentially expect those measures to be unwound. There is a risk that some of that spending might become permanent, and that is a different issue. In a way, what is nice about some of these things is that we have these very big temporary measures and we get a very big deficit that supports the economy during the bad times, but when it is over, it is over, and we go back to the same path, basically.

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