Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I will do my best. I was asked about the legislation at the start and we will have the legislation done on time. Some countries have no legislation done and I am not sure the British will have the legislation done on time but we will. The heads have been published and the Bill will be published on 22 February. If we can publish it any sooner than that, we certainly will do so. It is simpler than Members may think and I am not sure what background information there is to publish. What the officials did was go through all the different areas where legislation may be required and they came up with 17 different areas where we would require primary legislation and then other areas where we will require secondary legislation. Members have that information on the different areas such as healthcare, business, communications and so on. I do not need to go through them because the heads have been published.

On the procedure, as indicated when I met the party leaders last week, we will consult with the Opposition on the appropriate procedure. I heard some support in the House for taking this legislation in a committee of the House. That makes sense to me because it means the lead Minister, Deputy Coveney, or the Minister of State, Deputy McEntee, can be there and the line Minister can also be there. Splitting it up into nine different committees or having Ministers coming in and out of the same committee would be unworkable. I am conscious that I do not have a majority in the House and will require the support of the Opposition to get this through. I would be happy to have those conversations again, either at the level of Whip or at party leader level.

On the fiscal impact, the Department of Finance's projections in the event of a no-deal hard Brexit were not published sooner because they were only finalised last week and they had to go to Cabinet first. I would say that the Central Bank projections are similar, with the Department of Finance's projections being a little bit more optimistic. However, the ESRI and Copenhagen Economics projections were much more optimistic than the Department of Finance's ones. The difficulty with economic and fiscal forecasts is that they are just forecasts and nobody knows for sure what impact a hard Brexit with no deal would have on Ireland. We do not know how much it would affect consumer confidence, for example, and at what level tariffs would be imposed by the UK, if at all. These are assumptions but we have to build our budget and we have to operate on assumptions and these are our revised assumptions.

The public finances indicate that rather than having a small surplus in 2019, the budget will go back into a deficit of about 0.2% of GDP, that the deficit would rise to 0.5% of GDP in 2020, that it would rise again in 2021 and that we would then go back into surplus in 2022. In many ways, it proves the position that the Government took around budget time to be correct. There were many people in this House, particularly on the left, arguing that we should spend more and fund that spending through additional borrowing and because we did not take that advice-----

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