Michael Noonan (Limerick City, Fine Gael)
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This document will not be sent to the Commission until this debate is completed. We will send it then either tonight or tomorrow morning. We deliberately held it back from the Commission so we could have this debate. The committee is getting the first cut of this. I could not bring it to the committee until I cleared it with the Government. As the Deputy knows, the troika is in town and, obviously, it had an interest in this too. I brought it to the committee at the first available opportunity.

There was nothing to stop the Deputy studying the raft of documents he referred to earlier for the past month because he knew we were having this debate anyway. He did not have to wait for my speech before he started to examine the documents. The Deputy was not inhibited in any way whatsoever. Germany has the right to publish on 17 April but it is our right to publish any time in April.

It is correct this will be sent to the Commission and circulated to other European parliaments. I said in my statement that there would be peer review. There is a whole raft of new fiscal rules coming in for Europe which will not apply directly to us immediately because we have firmer rules in our programme. As soon as we are out of the programme, the new fiscal rules will apply. That is what a fiscal union is about and that is the way Europe is moving.