Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

I would definitely prefer to be in a position whereby we did not need to use Supplementary Estimates. The best practice that the IMF wants us to adhere to makes an awful lot of sense. We try to be in a position where we can avoid using them, but they are needed. At times they are needed because things happen during the year that we do not expect. They also happen because we now have a feature of our budget process where we use non-core funding, which means we allocate funding to Departments within the year, and because we do that we use Supplementary Estimates to do it. I am a big supporter of using a non-core approach for funding because in the absence of doing that, we end up baking in to the spending figures large amounts of money which may not be needed in the future if an external shock passes, like a pandemic ebbing. I fully accept the point of the IMF but it is not always possible to deliver that best practice in the prevailing environment in recent years.