Dr. Seán Healy:

Reference was made to the pensions question. We carried out a study, published in 2013, on how a universal pension could replace the old age pension at the level of the contributory old age pension. We used actuarial numbers produced for the Department of Finance and the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform. We costed it through to 2046 and we showed how it could be paid for. It can be done.

We have built in all the population increases, the changes in the pension age and all that sort of stuff. We have worked out exactly how a universal pension might be developed over the years and how it might be tied to growth in the consumer price index, economic growth and so on. The total net cost would be €140 million. It would have been funded partly by standard rating, not eliminating, the pension tax break that exists at the moment and a couple of other relatively small changes. We will publish a fully updated version of that study within a month so it will be available for the budget of 2018.

The second question was on budget information. I am delighted that Deputy Calleary picked up on the issue because we have tried to get people to hear about it for a while. We are of the view that if Deputies and Senators realise that they used to be provided with a lot more information then they might be interested in chasing it. Let me give an example. For the first time in my life GNP was not mentioned in the budget documentation this year. That is extraordinary. Our organisation has been berated for years for using GDP. The reason we used GDP was for international comparisons. We always put in GNP for the total tax take and various other pieces such as how one counts overseas development aid. We always got dog's abuse for using GDP, with the point being we should always use GNP, but the Government's budget document does not contain a single reference to GNP, which I find extraordinary. There are issues about why that has happened and they must be pursued.

Let me give another example. The full-year costs were always given. In a normal budget one would get the actual proposal, one would get a column that said the cost for this budget period, which is 2017 in this case, and a full-year cost. Some things are full year cost in year one but a lot of stuff is not full-year cost in year one. Welfare changes can happen later in the year. A whole lot of other stuff and even some of the proposed tax changes are not in place for a full year in 2017.

Let me outline a third issue in overall terms. The budget has been laid out in a slightly different way. The document went through budget initiatives Department by Department or budget heading by budget heading. Let us take health as an example. It said we are going to increase the budget in health by X and it then showed where that budget was broken down. At this moment we are not getting that. What we are getting is the budget will be increased by this, and we are going to send that to the HSE, which will come back to us with a service plan that will implement all of the existing level of service plus these three or five new initiatives we have proposed. My point is there is no basis for it. I have pointed at health because we are quite sure that the numbers are wrong in health and we have said so already. By the way, we have said it before and were right each time, particularly about the health budget. I am saying it again and we can give more information if people are interested.