Mr. Seamus Coffey:

The prudence account is more linked to the excess corporation tax receipts and looking at outperformance relative to profile so that any excess funds do not remain within the budgetary arithmetic and in a sense mask some of the poor performance and bad budgetary management we have seen. If there are overruns in the area of health, for example, they should be visible and we should see the consequences of those decisions. What we have seen over the last number of years is that large overruns in certain areas have been masked by those corporation tax receipts.

The prudence account is probably more linked to these volatile and perhaps temporary revenue sources, taking them out and making visible the consequences of some of the bad practices over the last number of years.