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

The reason for that is we had just finished many different sequences of budgetary meetings that had been focused on how we put together the budget. Nearly all of those meetings were focused on current expenditure. That is the reason, as some of the emails acknowledge. We had just finished a period of Estimates negotiations and we were then moving on to implement the budget. As soon as I became aware of the issue and the scale of it, the same memos will show the scale of engagement that then happened between the two Departments.

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