Daniel Murray

speaker

74 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 14 Jul

Daniel Murray’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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The Claire Byrne Show · Government urged to deliver a budget for workers · 14 Jul 2026 podcast

Morning Clare.

Well, certainly if you look at the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council's numbers, it doesn't appear that there is enough money.

So there's a couple of unique things, I guess, about this upcoming budget, Budget 2027.

For the first time really in ever, we know exactly what the spending ceiling is going to be for next year due to kind of new European fiscal rules.

And that basically means that this early in the year, we know exactly what the spending pot is going to be for next year, which is 7.7 billion

And what we reported at the weekend is that an analysis done by IFAC shows that when you add up a whole load of unavoidable costs, like cost overruns in departments this year, as you mentioned, a growing and an aging population, the cost of inflation on the state,

Then there's only about 800 million left over for new spending measures next year.

And that's before you do a public sector pay deal.

A modest one of about 1 billion, which would be in and around a 4% pay rise, would cost 1 billion and therefore would completely blow the budget sums.

So as it stands, it doesn't look like there's enough money in the budget to do both the public sector pay deal and to do new budget measures.

So there's nothing that's legally actually holding us to that number, but the optics of departing from it at this stage would be really bad.

Both Jack Chambers and Simon Harris, since he's come into the Department of Finance, have insisted, having only published their new EU fiscal plan at the end of last year, have insisted that they're going to stick to their five-year spending ceiling.

So this will only be the first of five years of predetermined

spending ceilings.

Up until last week, the Minister for Public Expenditure, Jack Chambers, was saying, yes, we will do the next budget within those spending ceilings.

And similarly, the Finance Minister, Simon Harris.

So unless something changes in the next two weeks when they're going to publish their summary economic statement, which will actually set out for definite what is going to be the budget parameters come October, then it very much looks like they're going to stick to that ceiling and therefore have to find a way to work within it.

Certainly, government sources were saying to me at the weekend that where they dispute IFAC's figures are on those kind of costs of standing still.

It's sometimes called the existing levels of service.

So it'll be things like overspends in departments.

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