Michael Noonan (Limerick City, Fine Gael)
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In the previous Dáil, the timing of the draft SPU was moved forward to April. April was chosen because a lot of data come in March. In terms of the annual budgetary cycle, the 2017 budget will commence on 1 January 2017. We will see how things are going after the end of the first quarter, which is the end of March, and get the statistics for expenditure and revenue in the normal way. The monthly statistics are a bit jumpy, so to speak. Sometimes they do not make an awful lot of sense on which to base policy. We begin to get the picture once we have quarterly figures. That is the reason we do it in April. If it were to be brought forward, it could be done but we could not vouch for its accuracy. That is the problem.