Mr. Matt McGann:

It is important to point out how the rainy day fund was designed. It was not with the intention of necessarily funding future pension liabilities, as the NPRF was. It is more as a stabilisation function for potential future crashes or unusual events.

In terms of the corporation tax receipts, the Department has consistently said that we need to be careful about what we do with what are potentially windfall receipts and allow them to feed into the expenditure base. We had an unhappy experience in the 2000s when we allowed taxes that were not structurally permanent to feed into the expenditure base.