Dáil debates

Tuesday, 3 July 2018

2:30 pm

Photo of Simon CoveneySimon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The €3.4 billion is in our view what the country should be spending next year, recognising the fact that we now have a strong economy with the capacity to fund that kind of increased expenditure. However, we are not in the business of borrowing more money and increasing national debt at a time when we should be trying to reduce it so that if in the future the economy faces a shock to which the Government needs to respond, we do not have the kind of debt that fortunately we did not have when we had to respond to the last financial crisis the country had to deal with. Personal and national indebtedness are things we need to work on and we need to increase expenditure dramatically to make up for a lack of capital investment in particular in recent years and we are committed to doing that. Over the next ten years, we will spend €116 billion on a capital expenditure programme, going from spending considerably less than the European average to spending considerably more in that period.

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