Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Independent)
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I recognise the efforts of the Minister and his officials in bringing the draft SPU to the committee with time for us to have an input into it. He says on page 1 that the three pillars of the medium-term economic strategy are competitiveness, credit and public finances. I would love debt resolution to be added to them. It is probably the key driver of economic growth missing from the strategy. I would love to see that factored in explicitly, if possible. The Minister also referenced on page 1 improvements to the budgetary process, which are great. I would like to give one final plug for the equality budgeting submission I sent to him. Even if he thinks it is not possible to implement it in full, it would be incredibly useful on budget day when he and the Minster for Public Expenditure and Reform announce the budget if all Members, as well as having the literature we were given last year, had some form of distributional analysis, be it by income decile, gender, rural versus urban and so on.

There is a fantastic graph on page 14 of the document, which breaks down the change in the deficit between 2013 and 2014 in the context of interest, revenue buoyancy, carryover, new policy measures and so on. I began my proposal for budget 2015 this week and it would be incredibly useful to get the Minister's opinion and that of his officials as far ahead of time as possible as to what the new policy requirements, including carryover, revenue buoyancy and other factors will be and I acknowledge these will be estimates. If we could get that a few weeks before budget day, it would be incredibly useful in the context of knowing what is required in terms of new measures as opposed to the overall package.

We have been discussing a figure of €2 billion. Will this be generated from new policy changes or will it include carryover, revenue buoyancy and so on?