Jonathan O'Brien (Cork North Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I will be equally as brief as Deputy Cowen who said the Bill will put the Parliamentary Budget Office and the Office of the Parliamentary Legal Advisers on a statutory footing. We have seen the benefits of the Parliamentary Budget Office, in particular, in some of the material it has published for the Committee on Budgetary Oversight throughout the past 12 months. Sinn Féin will not hold up the passage of the Bill, but I note that there is a once-off allocation of €9 million for one general election to be held between now and the end of 2021. That perhaps might be a little optimistic. We might be back to a situation similar to that in the early 1980s.

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