Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party)
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I return to the question of additional borrowing. The Minister is absolutely correct that over the years, politicians have all looked for more spending on everything but on this occasion, it was meant to be different. We are a budget oversight committee, the first of its kind. We had a meeting earlier today with the Parliamentary Budget Office, which we have resourced to advise us. Last week, we had a meeting with the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council, which was established after the crash to specifically avoid what the Minister just mentioned. There was an accusation that no one from the Opposition was calling on the Minister to spend less.

The Irish Fiscal Advisory Council would say that the Opposition did not know where the goalposts were because they kept moving. In our budget submission every year, we tried to address what the council was saying because we wanted to learn the lessons of the past. What the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council says is true, that even when that was done, it did not matter because the Government turned up on budget day with a whole load of additional measures. That meant it was a different game that everyone was playing and we were not comparing like with like.

I was unable to get the record that is usefully prepared of what the representatives of the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council said last Thursday but my recollection, which can perhaps be checked and we can come back to it, is that they were fairly clear in referring to €2.8 billion. The council said that its assessment was that, even with a hard, crash-out Brexit, we would not go into a recession, although it would cause a dramatic fall in gross domestic product, GDP, or gross national income, GNI, or whatever measure one wants to use. The Irish Fiscal Advisory Council did not anticipate an immediate recession that would warrant the sort of borrowing the Minister is talking about. If I recall rightly, the council representatives said that, if the economy did go into recession, one could then switch to countercyclical borrowing, but they advised against doing that in this budget. I wanted to check the record because I think that advice even covered specific, additional measures that the Minister might want to prepare for sectors that might need it. I stand to be corrected when I read the record and it is difficult to check with those witnesses because they are independent, so we will have to check the record.

My understanding is that the Minister has said today that the Government intends to ignore the advice of the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council and engage in additional borrowing. Each party is working on its financial submission and ours was based on an intention to borrow, to be honest. We had to turn that 360 degrees around last Thursday because we could not ignore that the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council said that does not look prudent. We had to scale back our borrowing intentions and we are now looking at a few additional tax measures to cover some of the amounts that need to be spent. The point I am making, in a long-winded manner, is that it seems to me that the Minister is saying that he will not take the advice of the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council subject to a no-deal Brexit. The council factored that in and said, even in those circumstances, the Minister should not do the amount of borrowing he is talking about. Is he not going to do that?