Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour) | Oireachtas source

This section was added to amend the Fiscal Responsibility Act 2012 to assign the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council statutory responsibility for endorsing the macroeconomic forecast on which the budget and stability programme will be based. In essence, this would be an assignment carried out by the Minister for Finance. Under the new European architecture for the budget, we need to assign responsibility for the determination and endorsement of the macroeconomic forecast, a creature of the Department of Finance, to an independent body. We have determined that it should be the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council. Since we need to have it done in advance of the early budget this year, this was the only available legislative instrument to achieve it.