Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour) | Oireachtas source

The Government published the Revised Estimates in December 2013, with the amount allocated being consistent, as I indicated, with the budget 2014 target of reducing the deficit to 4.8% of GDP.

In the period since then, the fiscal and economic outlook has improved and strong growth has returned an initial 30,000 jobs. Receipts into State coffers are €1.1 billion ahead of what we profiled. As a result, we have been in a position to focus, for the first time in many years, on increasing the delivery of essential public service spending and to consider dealing with certain expenditure pressures through Supplementary Estimates. We are still going to meet all our fiscal targets in spades. The reduced 4.8% deficit for this year will be handsomely exceeded and we will have a deficit of well below 4% this year, reducing next year to 2.7%. Therefore, it is clear we should deploy some of the additional capacity we have to meet pressures. After years of tight budgeting, we should ease the pressure in some areas.

The Deputy is quite wrong on a number of the assertions she made and I have corrected them. The €1.2 billion additional Supplementary Estimate is not new money. Some of these things are a timing issue, as indicated. Some €177 million, for example, in the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, arises because moneys expected from the European Union this year will not come until next year. We will get the money next year, but we must provide for it this year. A sum of €77 million from the Department of Education and Skills is an accounting sum, because the Comptroller and Auditor General asked for it to be accounted for in 2014 rather than 2013. Of course, that will reduce the expenditure in 2013.

The real and only additional money - because the rest has arisen largely from savings we have made across all other Votes - is in the health area, because I am conscious of the real pressures in that area. It is not that there was underfunding last year. For ten years we have had a Supplementary Estimate in the Department of Health and Children, because the provision of health services has become more complex and new drugs and services are coming on stream. There will always be that sort of pressure, not only in the Irish health service, but in every health service on the planet. I have discussed this with the OECD.

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