Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

-----and how will they be accommodated within the fiscal space? On the increase in the net fiscal space from €500 million to €900 million, there should be a technical paper. In this day and age, the Minister cannot come into the Dáil and simply say, "By the way, the amount of money we can spend in the budget next year has nearly doubled." Those days are gone. That is Charlie McCreevy style. The Opposition wishes to engage on what is in the best interests of the country, with different ideologies on investment, public services and so on but with the same principle of wanting what is best for the country, not wanting to bankrupt it, as has happened under previous Governments. If the Government wants to treat the Opposition with respect, we need the papers to back it up. We need the papers that explain where the other €400 million in the net fiscal space for this year is coming from. There has to be a series of engagements all the way through to the budget when the figures are being hardened up during the summer months.

On some of the risks involved, we have had a debate on Brexit, on which Sinn Féin is campaigning on part of the island for a "No" vote. The implications are something we have raised consistently through Senator Kathryn Reilly in the committee on Brexit. Carbon credits are mentioned in the document as one of the risks. We will have to spend hundreds of millions of euro because we will not reach our targets in 2020. That needs to be quantified. We have seen from the replies to previous parliamentary questions that on one element of it, we are probably going to be out by about 2% and that each 1% will cost the State about €150 million. We also do not know what the greenhouse gases effect will mean in terms of cost. We need an estimation of the risks involved.

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