Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Tuesday, 1 July 2025
Committee on Budgetary Oversight
Fiscal Assessment Report: Engagement with the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council
2:00 am
Mr. Seamus Coffey:
It is difficult to say. Going back to an earlier exchange, we would view some of the planning and budgeting for current and capital spending as being somewhat different. Money is fungible. We could say that we are putting the additional corporation tax revenues into capital spending but we cannot differentiate between income flows and say that one income flow is going to a particular area. Income flows into a pot, where it is all put together and then we decide how we are going to allocate it. Trying to delineate and saying that this money is going towards a particular area is not necessarily instructive. We have to look at the overall picture of what is being done in totality, rather than trying to silo things. We argue that we should have more capital spending, but using additional corporation tax to fund it is not necessarily the way to go about it.