Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein)
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198. To ask the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform for a breakdown of the line item, public capital plan, for each of the years 2016 to 2021, inclusive, contained in the 2016 budget manual, page C 51, table A9, line 5. [5579/16]

Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour)
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The line item referred to in the Deputy's question is calculated from the difference between the gross voted capital ceilings 2016-2021 as published in the Stability Programme Update (SPU) in April 2015 and the gross voted capital ceilings as published in the capital plan "Building on Recovery: Infrastructure and Capital Investment" in September 2015.  The increases in Exchequer capital investment over that published in the SPU range from an extra €0.1bn in 2016 to an extra €1.6bn in 2021.

Given the effect of capital smoothing whereby a four year average is taken, this results in only a quarter of the increases in the Public Capital plan having an impact on estimated fiscal space derived using the Expenditure Benchmark.  For example, the €0.4bn increase in the 2018 capital ceiling in the capital plan compared to the SPU will only use €0.1bn of projected fiscal space.