Mr. Seamus Coffey:

When we used the phrase "pumping money into an economy", it primarily referred to 2024. The public finances should respond to inflation and inflation was high in 2023. That is something the council took into consideration when making its assessment there, but inflation was much lower in 2024 and spending growth was far in excess of even the real growth of the economy plus inflation. It was expansionary in a climate that did not necessarily need it. On the underlying deficit, we just make two adjustments. We adjust for the current high cyclical position of the economy. We have very high employment and low unemployment. What if they were to go back to more normal levels? The second adjustment looks at corporation tax. This one is difficult; what is the excess? We can look at the excess linked to maybe the performance of the economy. If you make those two adjustments, you get that underlying or structural deficit. That shows that, while at a headline level the public finances look in a strong position, there is an underlying weakness there because it is reliant on two things, namely, the economy continuing to perform strongly and the Exchequer continuing to collect these excessive large corporate tax receipts.

If these were to reverse, a deficit would emerge and some of the things we have done in recent years would have to be reversed.