Michael McGrath (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail)
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I have not provided any figures either on the record or off the record concerning what will be going into a future savings fund, but we published a paper which set out scenarios. Perhaps those figures which have been quoted came from that. I do not know. We hosted a policy conference yesterday in the Central Bank of Ireland on the idea of future-proofing the public finances. We had several international speakers and there was much helpful advice based on the international experience of setting up and operating such funds. We can certainly take that on board in future. We do, though, have significant decisions to make because we are in the fortunate position of running significant budget surpluses. I believe the context of a budget is the appropriate time to set out a plan for the management of the finances for the next period of time.

This will include looking at the national debt to explore if it makes sense to reduce it, if there are opportunities to reduce the annual servicing costs and the appropriate scale of a long-term saving fund to meet the costs that will definitely be coming our way. Consideration must also be given to the role of a public investment fund in respect of ensuring we can sustain high levels of public capital investment over the next several years. Feeding into all that, of course, will be an understanding of where we are going to be on the fiscal side of things. We will be refreshing all the forecasts we have, including the macroeconomic forecasts but also the fiscal and budgetary forecasts, on budget day. All this has to be worked through to ensure the decisions we are making in respect of the national debt, the savings fund, the investment fund and where we are in terms of future surpluses are all fully integrated and co-ordinated. This can really only be done in the context of a budget.

Turning to some of the Deputy's specific questions, the implementation of pillar two is factored in and assumed from 1 January 2024. The Oireachtas has already legislated for the carbon tax increases until 2030, so this is baked into the base level in terms of our numbers. Regarding taxation, as the Deputy knows, the spending rule is a net one. The figure we have put in for taxation of €1.1 billion for next year is a policy decision but this does approximate to the amount of revenue non-indexation would generate in the event of a Government deciding not to do anything with the tax system. It does generate approximately that amount. This is why the full 6.1% of expenditure increase is on the expenditure side. The tax side, essentially, would generate that amount of revenue if we were to do nothing. We could go further, but we would then have to raise additional revenue by way of further discretionary revenue-raising measures.