Michael Noonan (Limerick City, Fine Gael)
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Let us consider what we are doing here. Apart from fiscal reasons and conditions in Europe, the reason I am happy to project a set of figures for 2016 and to trace it out to 2019 is that I am keen to see if an extra adjustment is required, below the 3%, to get to a sustainable position. According to the figures we ran, it looks as though as long as we keep our expenditure below the growth rate in the economy, it leaves a little headroom for additional expenditure. Then, the growing economy between 2016 and 2019 should take us to our medium-term objective.