Dr. Eddie Casey:

The Deputy is correct. It is very difficult to say what a tax change will yield if we cannot tell how it will feed through each of these sectors individually. This is something that should be looked at in the modelling. If we model differently and develop much more granular models that take account of these factors, it will be easier for the likes of Revenue to say assuming we change taxes this way, we would expect it to feed through the system like this and we produce better estimates.

Regarding capital spending, the underspend to the end of November was €1.8 billion. This could be seen spread across loads of Departments. It was approximately €600 million in the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage while it was €300 million in the Department of Transport. It is laid out fairly clearly in the fiscal monitor. We can really see a very broad spread across all areas. It looks to be a problem. This year, it was difficult to undertake a lot of the projects people wanted to but I would caution that in December last year and to a lesser extent in other years as well, we would have seen a big ramp up in capital spending in that month. Very often, if we look at the past five or six years, we can see that the ratio of spending on capital that takes place in December versus every other month is about four to five times higher on average. We can imagine that there will be a big ramp up as well. A lot of it is to do with timing rather than when the action takes place but sometimes with contracts and things like that as well.