Dr. Stephen Kinsella:

I thank the Deputy very much and I also thank the committee for repeatedly listening to me.

I have made a number of recommendations down the years. The first was around fiscal stress testing of medium-term expenditure ceilings. IFAC has gone some way towards doing this. I convinced my colleagues on the council to examine this and some of the fiscal stress testing methodologies have been adopted there. These have not been looked at in the overall stability programme updates or anything like that.

We can argue in a certain sense that the Covid-19 pandemic is the perfect fiscal stress test. We have seen what happens to the income tax take, for example, when one sector of the economy, the low-wage sector, is hit. We know what that looks like now. That is the first part, in that the council has not necessarily listened that carefully, which is a pity. I would very much like to have seen more of that work being done, particularly in respect of the corporation tax issue. We have said that losing €2 billion might be the impact of that. If it is more than €2 billion, we are in very deep trouble.

The second issue that I raised, I believe, a year ago was the idea that this committee has a much deeper connection with the office of the Comptroller and Auditor General such that it formalises at a secretariat level structured dialogue processes, somewhat like the ones that the Higher Education Authority has with universities, whereby the committee is not just scrutinising next year's expenditure but is scrutinising the performance of the public sector as to that expenditure from the previous year. If the Oireachtas gives the university sector €1 billion, how was it spent? What is a good allocation of money? What did we learn from that experience? As we go into the next allocation phase what do we, as the public, know about programmes that work and those that do not. My argument there is that it is only through that feedback mechanism that the system will learn and will then get to programme-level level budgeting, which is very important. We do not know, for example, whether the provision of cancer care in the mid-west is better, worse, or anything in between than the provision of cancer care in Dublin. We have no idea as to the allocation of funding.

To answer the Deputy's question, a great deal has been done but there is certainly more to do to address these issues.