Enda Kenny (Mayo, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

-----was the need for a far closer conversation between the Department of the Taoiseach and the Department of Finance of the day. For whatever reason - I am not going to cast aspersions on anybody - that was not happening. The Government I led from 2011 comprised two parties and therefore there were different views on various things. Given the scale of the economic situation we faced, it was necessary to talk about things daily. The EMC was never a Cabinet in itself, but it was a way of short-circuiting arguments into a cohesive proposal that had to be accepted or rejected by the Government afterwards.

The publication of all these papers will come as a measure of the shortened time for the publication of Cabinet papers anyway. It is therefore not necessary now to have an Economic Management Council, as the country is not in an economic crisis. We are heading towards deficit and debt reduction, rising employment, and much lower interest rates available to us to borrow money. In that sense, I have no intention of restoring, nor do I wish to bring back to life, the Economic Management Council. It has gone; it is history. It played an important part in the vehement and difficult discussions on decisions that were to be made concerning both budgets and the situation that applied at European level. That is one the Deputy does not have to worry about for the future. The papers and decisions arising from recommendations of the EMC of those years will be published in due course. There is now a shortened time for the publication of Cabinet papers.

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