Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

What the Minister has basically told me is that whereas the Government always speaks about a huge increase in expenditure, by the time it came into office the hard decisions had already been made to pull it back to €52 billion. Is this correct? The Government only had to make decisions to reduce it to €49 billion. The Minister gave me a whole lot of information I had not sought. When the Government took over the reins its challenge was to bring it from €52 billion to €49 billion and not from the peak figure because we had already addressed this issue. It is still higher than the 2007 figure. Does the Minister accept this?

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