Michael McGrath (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

There is a sequence to this. The first step will be for the Government to make a formal decision to establish a long-term savings fund and a countercyclical public investment fund. I anticipate that the Government will make this decision in the coming weeks. The decision to be taken then is concerned with how much money we will put into the respective funds and it is one we will take in the context of the budget. This is a question the Minister, Deputy Donohoe, and I will discuss and consider. We will also engage with the party leaders before coming to a final view as to how much money should be populated into these respective funds.

In terms of scale, it would certainly be the case that the long-term savings fund will be of a far greater magnitude. The idea of the public investment fund, principally, is to ensure that in the event of a downturn or a shock, capital expenditure will not suffer in the way it did in the past when we had a cut of about 60% from peak to trough. In the event, then, that we hit a shock or a downturn in future, this fund is intended to enable us to continue to invest through the economic cycle and smooth out the level of public capital investment over that time. This is the essential purpose of such a fund. This is all subject, though, to a formal Government decision, which I expect will be made in the coming weeks. There will need to be a general scheme. The Oireachtas Joint Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach will of course have an opportunity to undertake pre-legislative scrutiny on such a proposal. I anticipate that it will be in the early part of next year when we will, hopefully, pass legislation to set up such funds.