Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 16 February 2022
Committee on Budgetary Oversight
Indexation of Taxation and Social Protection System: Discussion (Resumed)
Mr. Joe Cullen:
That is an issue that we referred to in our opening statement as a policy choice for the Government of the day. It would seem to me that if one puts arrangements in legislation, it is very rigid. Before one would go down that path, one would probably need to think carefully through all the other elements of the arrangement and make sure that one has it as good as one can get it before one puts it into legislation. That would suggest to me that perhaps, as a starting position, if one was going down this route, one might go with the non-statutory guidelines approach and suck it and see, as it were, for a period before moving to a statutory set of arrangements, which, as I said, tend to be a little bit more rigid.