Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein)
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I am not sure they will be commenced by that stage in terms of budget dates but we will leave that for another day.

I want to pick up on the issue of the rainy day fund. Is it still the Minister's intention to commit the level of funding that has been laid out in the summer economic statement given the likelihood that the net fiscal space in the coming years will reduce? Can the Minister tell us when he expects to bring forward concrete proposals for the rainy day fund? There has been a lot of talk, including from the Government side, that the rainy day fund can be deployed for this, that and the other. The reality is that we are governed by the expenditure benchmark so the fiscal space for any given year is the fiscal space. If the fiscal space is €1 billion and we have €5 billion in the rainy day fund, we cannot use the €5 billion. We can only use €1 billion of it. There is an issue here about how the rainy day fund can be used and for what purposes, so can the Minister give us an indication as to when we will see some real proposals about how the rainy day fund will operate and whether he is still committed to that level of money being set aside given the likelihood of the net fiscal space being contracted?