Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

With regard to current levels of investment, we are looking to do more than just keep up with demographics, particularly in education and health. One of the benefits of the new approach that has been adopted in how we class government expenditure is that we set aside the portion due for demographics. I have always acknowledged that we must hire a certain number of teachers just to maintain class sizes as they are due to the effect of demographics. We recognised that in what we publish, and the same applies in health issues and our social welfare system. We want to increase this in the way I have outlined to the Deputy, although this depends on our economy growing at a moderate rate across the next five years.

With regard to the debt figure set by the Minister for Finance, Deputy Noonan, the objective is to move to that debt figure across the 2020s. I support the objective as it is to precisely create the kind of buffer zone in our national debt so that if we get hit again by external forces, as happened in recent years, we will have health within our national finances to allow us to respond in a way that we have not been able to in recent years.

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