My question is related and asks the Minister what he is doing to protect public service provision in light of the levies he has put on other Departments. We keep hearing about efficiencies and reform, and we are all for that, but it is quite vague. There has been strong criticism of his budgetary process from the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council. Has he taken on board its criticisms and what changes will he make in light of that?

The Government agreed a medium-term fiscal structural plan in December last year. This sets out expenditure ceilings for the period to 2030. It provides significant uplifts in expenditure over the coming years, with gross voted spending to reach €147.3 billion in 2030. As set out in the plan, the ceiling for 2027 will increase to €125.5 billion. This is an uplift of €7 billion over the 2026 expenditure ceiling of €118.5 billion. Delivery of the plan over the medium-term horizon will require enhanced expenditure control, reducing and avoiding in-year decisions with carryover costs for subsequent years and robust oversight mechanisms. In April, Government agreed that additional funding of €646 million will be provided to the Department of Education and Youth in 2026. To accommodate this reprioritisation and deliver on the 2027 ceiling agreed under the plan, a levy has been introduced across other Departments, which have been asked to deliver efficiencies and reforms totalling €446 million from 2027. This should be considered through the lens of an overall uplift of €7 billion for expenditure in 2027 and will not impact 2026 allocations. The delivery of reforms and efficiencies supports adherence to the expenditure ceilings set out in our plan. It reflects the need to moderate the rate of expenditure growth across Departments to facilitate the decision to reprioritise and provide additional investment to the education sector within our wider fiscal framework out to 2030. The scale of the efficiencies to be found ranges from 0.02% to 1.4% on the 2026 current funding across all other Vote groups. The distribution of the levy has been designed to protect certain areas, which are the social protection Vote group non-pay allocation, Department of Health pay allocation, the specialist disability services subhead in the Department of Children, Disability and Equality, the Justice, Home affairs and Migration group pay, Housing, Local Government and Heritage group non-pay and pension funding across all Votes.

My Department wrote to Secretaries General following the Government decision, informing them of the need to identify efficiencies and reforms, and that this would form a key element of the Estimates engagement for budget 2027. Each Department will now have to determine how the levy will be applied across the Vote group and identify the efficiencies and reforms required to ensure this.

I appreciate that, but this is what the Minister has been saying publicly for the past number of weeks. What I am seeking to address with him is strong criticism of him and his Department in terms of their budget allocation process.

For example, the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council points out that the Minister's Department got the allocations and estimations in terms of what we would spend on doctors and nurses in the last three months of last year wrong and that every year his Department does not base its budget allocations on what was spent the year before and often reducing them back to an unrealistic level. The council said:

The budgetary allocation was too low from the start. Delivering planned services on budget becomes nearly impossible if funding was never sufficient. That responsibility lies with the Department of Public Expenditure.

It went on to accuse the Minister and his Department of "bad budgeting". The Irish Fiscal Advisory Council doing that is very serious, so what is the Minister doing to address this? The council made recommendations to him on what he should do. Are he and his Department listening to the council and taking what it says on board? Are he and his Department going to change their process or will they continue to just blame the Departments when the independent body is clearly saying the responsibility lies with them?

We take everything the council says seriously in the context of its independent role. I am also conscious of what it says on the medium- to long-term horizon about how we manage overall expenditure to ensure it is on a safe and sustainable path. I do not think the council is arguing for a much bigger overall allocation. The Deputy is giving one side and reflecting one side in that context. On the Department of education, the allocation going into 2026 was a 10% allocation, which was far in excess of the overall expenditure growth rate, because of the need to respond to the specific necessities around education within our society, and Government prioritised that over other areas. When it comes to the Department of Health, it is on the back of exponential growth in health expenditure in recent years. There is a need in that Department, and indeed in other Departments, to focus on how we can improve the overall outputs, efficiencies and reforms in the context of the growth in spending in the last five years so we can achieve our overall ambition and objective, which is to moderate current expenditure so we can have the fiscal space to ramp up investment in infrastructure.

I thank the Minister. What we are lacking here is any clear information from him or the other Ministers about what is actually going on, why this is happening, what he and his Department are going to do correct it in terms of their budgeting process and where these savings, efficiencies and reforms are going to come about. A senior economist at the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council said:

A better and more transparent approach would be to:

Estimate the cost of existing services based on actual year-to-date spending—not original allocations, as is the current approach

Publish estimates of the change in cost of existing services, decomposed into its causes: demographics, pay, and price pressures [Then we would have transparency around this.]

Only then, set and publish estimates of savings targets (following negotiation) ...

The economist has given very specific advice on what the Minister and his Department need to do to correct this. We need that information and that transparency, so why are the Minister and his Department not providing it? Why is it just the same talk of how we are doing levies, efficiencies and reforms? We do not know what that means, what impact it is going to have and what the Minister and his Department are actually doing to get under the bonnet to fix this budgeting process.

What we did very seriously in budget 2026 is ensure most Government Departments are within profile and that their allocation is successfully delivering across what was set out in the budgetary context. The issue with what the Deputy has presented is just taking ELS as it is today and saying you are going to add more avoids the need to drive efficiencies within the current base of spending and the need to drive reforms within the current base of spending so we improve the qualitative outputs that come from that. By just looking at-----

Nurses' and teachers' pay is fixed though.

Looking for just additionality in the context of a current expenditure track for a particular policy area does not allow for an overall better evaluation of how we can get more for the current base of spend. That is how we have changed how we have approached overall expenditure policy. We are looking at the total expenditure rather than just looking at ELS and adding more. In the medium term that will improve the overall sustainability of our expenditure-----

It will not drive down wage growth.

-----but also improve efficiencies and strengthen the focus on reform. That is my priority in the months ahead.