Economic Policy
Dail Éireann — 2025-12-18
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Simon Harris (FG), Wicklow

Without being smart, it depends on how you define multi-annual budgeting. What this will enable us to do is set out a horizon for spending levels out to the end of the decade. That provides greater certainty for the Department of public expenditure and others to engage multi-annual funding, which interestingly is something IFAC is very supportive of. It made a very positive difference when we introduced it in health for a two-year period. I met representatives from IFAC. I do not wish to speak for the council, but its main requirement is that the Government should set out a medium-term plan and stick to it. I think I am correctly paraphrasing what was said. Governments can decide what the level of spending should be, but IFAC's concern - and, certainly, what I took from it - is that it is important that when the Government publishes a medium-term plan, it sticks to it. There is a requirement for a net expenditure growth path. Net primary spending is a technical definition of public expenditure defined as general government spending adjusted for interest expenditure, discretionary revenue measures, expenditure on programmes matched or co-financed by the European Union, cyclical elements of unemployment benefit and one-off temporary expenditure items outside the control of government. There will be a commitment to that in the plan tomorrow.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2025-12-18/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:29+00:00
Sitting date: 2025-12-18