Dr. Claire Keane:

The rationale for one-off measures is to try to not. We keep hearing from Dr. McQuinn and the Central Bank that by releasing more money into the economy, we can make inflation worse and it becomes this cycle that is difficult to break. That is the rationale for one-off measures. They are given but they are not permanent increases, so that when inflation falls back, they can be withdrawn.

We need to keep an eye on what inflation looks like and what the forecasts are. Do we need more one-off measures this year? Last year they were successful. But for the one-off measures, it would have been a regressive budget. However, because of the one-off measures, the budget represented progress and supported those on lower incomes more so than those on higher incomes. We have to keep an eye on that. We will do an analysis of the budget. We will have an event in the week following the budget to see whether any one-off measures were effective in supporting the incomes of those at the lower end of the income distribution. That was a plug for our post-budget analysis. We will do that. We do it every year.