Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

It is not national. The Oireachtas has never agreed to this rule. This is a majority of Deputies who make up the coalition agreeing to it in their parties. It is important. It is more than semantics, because as I said IFAC has a crucial role in educating and guiding people on complex issues and there is no national rule.

Unfortunately, I will have to go the Chamber because time is catching up with us. It was an interesting debate on the recategorisation of expenditure. If a government is going to do something to support people in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis IFAC is saying it should be classified as core expenditure and if that government is not going to do it next year then it should remove it, even though it is thinking of doing it just as a once-off. However, IFAC has accepted non-core expenditure in previous years. Indeed, it believed in another summer economic statement that non-core expenditure, that is, temporary expenditure, was the prudent position of the Government. IFAC believed it was fine to have all the expenditure on Covid and the invasion of Ukraine as temporary expenditure even though there is no indication when the billions of euro will actually cease, but if we want to do a one-off support for people with petrol or diesel the council thinks we should be putting it into core expenditure. I do not see the logic of that.