Mr. Michael Tutty:

On the commercial stamp duty, I commented on that at our last visit here and I found myself being quoted at another Oireachtas committee a few months later and appearing in The Irish Times, which surprised me. At the time, we were looking at the level of increase the Department of Finance was projecting from the stamp duty increase and it seemed to be assuming that the boom in commercial property would continue. We were worried that we would use money from boom time commercial stamp duty to fund long-term expenditures once again. We were querying whether it would bring in that sort of revenue over time. The receipts so far this year have been behind what the Department of Finance was estimating so we may find that all the money is not coming in, even in the first year, not to mind that it will come in in later years. Like corporation tax, we should not be making our long-term expenditure dependent on receipts from a cyclical type of revenue. That commercial building will not last forever at the sort of rate it was taking place.

The Deputy spoke about the proposals that continue to be put forward by Deputies. We do not have a remit to determine where our money should be spent. We have a remit to examine the overall balance between expenditure and revenue. We would not be concerned about more expenditure as long as it is being funded from extra revenue. We do not have to start looking at individual proposals in different areas and say we believe that is good or it is not good. That is a matter for the politicians to look at and determine what the balance is between different expenditures.