Michael Noonan (Limerick City, Fine Gael)

In our discussions with the IMF and the European partners, they made it quite clear, and we assented quite willingly because we made it quite clear during the election, that whatever changes we made to the conditions in the memorandum of understanding would be fiscally neutral. In other words, if we substituted a range of measures, whether taxes or expenditure savings, by another range of measures, the fiscal impact would be the same. That is the position. Of course, we will bring forward counterbalancing measures. The Department of Finance is examining a range of such measures and we will announce them in the context of the budget in due course. We will not resile from any commitment we made given that one set of measures will be substituted by another set of measures of equal value or, to put it more correctly, equal fiscal impact.

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