Mr. Sebastian Barnes:

Returning to the planning question regarding Covid-19, we accept that it has obviously been a complicated year and the Government had many things on its plate that were challenging and had to be dealt with urgently. On the other hand, many of the Covid-19 measures have been fairly temporary and there has been strong evidence in the public finances that the economy will bounce back. This is sort of a temporary situation. The economy will come back and then we will be in a situation that will not be that different from the one we would have been in before Covid-19 struck. While there is much uncertainty in that regard, there are many things we do know about, such as, for example, that the population is aging and climate change needs to be addressed anyway.

Equally regarding long-term planning, one of our concerns is that despite the impact of Covid-19 the Government has been moving ahead on different things. In the budget, it committed at least €4.5 billion in permanent spending that was not related to Covid-19. That is a huge increase. We have also seen a great deal of activity regarding the Climate Action and Low Carbon Development (Amendment) Bill 2021 and progress is being made in the implementation of Sláintecare. Therefore, the Government is undertaking many initiatives and it is good that life goes on while Covid-19 is with us. Those initiatives are advancing. Our great concern is that the one piece missing from those pictures is how these initiatives are going to be paid for and how much they are going to cost. It would be possible to state that things have been too complicated this year and the Government has not been able to plan anything and has just been focused on Covid-19. However, that has not been the case. Progress has been made on different things by the Government, but it has just not been able to address how those initiatives are going to be funded.