Michael McGrath (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The Deputy is very quick to advise us how to spend the surpluses, but he pays very little heed to why we have surpluses. It is due to the enterprise model that Ireland has successfully developed over many decades, our commitment to European Union membership and the euro, political stability, and successive governments running pro-enterprise business policies and implementing such policies.

The debate does not start with "What do we do with the surpluses?" It is "Why are we in the position that we are in today?" as an outlier in European Union terms, on the positive side, because we have such surpluses. Of course it gives us policy choices but as we said in the summer economic statement, there was 6.1% expenditure growth on core expenditure and an additional non-core expenditure of €4 billion. We have committed an extra €250 million to the public capital programme next year which will already be in excess of €13 billion. That is high in European terms, and rightly so, because we have to build the homes that our country needs and invest in education, transport infrastructure, healthcare infrastructure and energy infrastructure. We will set out on budget day what our plans are for the surpluses that, thankfully, we are enjoying because it gives us policy choices into the future which include spending more on capital infrastructure. However, it also has to involve providing for the future. Otherwise we would be consigning the students who are protesting now to much higher taxes in a decade or 15 or 20 years' time when the demographic changes really begin to bite.

See this speech in context