Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak in the Seanad and to contribute to this debate on budget 2015. Earlier today, the Ministers, Deputies Michael Noonan and Brendan Howlin, presented to Dáil Éireann the Government's fourth budget and the first since Ireland regained its economic sovereignty following the successful exit from the EU-IMF programme at the end of last year.

This budget is not just another big step towards stabilising the public finances; it also places the economy firmly on the road to sustainable, job-rich growth, which will support business and provide for investing in our future while, at the same time, helping to build a fairer Ireland by supporting our citizens of all ages. Taking account of all the measures announced today, budget 2015 is expected to add 0.3 percentage points to GDP growth next year, as rising household income feeds through to higher employment and consumption.

This is something I know Senators will all welcome.

We are seeing the successful result of the great effort made in the past three years to repair the public finances and put them on the path to recovery. This success is clearly illustrated by the over-achievement of the general Government deficit target for this year and by the achievement for the first time since 2007 of a primary budget surplus for 2014. The size of this surplus is projected to increase in 2015 and to keep on increasing over the following three years. Achieving a primary surplus is an important milestone along the road to recovery, because it means that once debt servicing costs are excluded, we are now taking in more tax than we are spending and we can start to reduce the volume of our national debt.

While meeting our commitments to stabilise the public finances is the Government's central priority, budget 2015 is not just about that and will do a lot more than that. Accordingly, it contains measures to add impetus to the economic recovery that is clearly under way as well as measures to ensure this impetus will spread as widely as possible throughout the economy. It will also provide practical support for large numbers of those worst affected by the downturn - the unemployed and especially the long-term unemployed - and will help set about enabling them to get jobs, despite the serious constraints imposed on the public finances by our commitments. This is an ambitious budget, but it is an ambition that is based on favourable current developments and realistic expectations for the year ahead. I wish, therefore, to outline to the House the economic developments and fiscal arithmetic that underpin the budget, before dealing with the specific provisions.