Brendan Ryan (Labour)

Over the coming days we will be presented with multi-annual figures for various expenditures of a capital nature which people will try to pretend all relate to this year. In fact, many of them have to be divided by five to figure out what is going on. I have no problem with multi-annual budgeting but we should not get involved in arguments about statistical manipulation with a Government that is very good at manipulating the presentation of the issue of multi-annual budgeting to its own devices.