Dr Emma Howard

speaker

282 appearances 4 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 25 Aug

Dr Emma Howard’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 2.

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Today with David McCullagh · The coalition blame game and a vote of no confidence · 14 Apr 2026 podcast

So it remains to be seen whether this will be able to go through as it stands.

But if it does, I mean, Jack mentioned the size of the most recent announcement, but if you put it together with the previous package, that's almost three quarters of a billion extra spending that the government is doing.

And we saw figures from last week from the Department of Finance showing that spending this year was up 6.4% from last year.

And so the government had initially set a sustainable spending rule of 5%.

Minister Harris increased that and said they were going to stick to a 6% increase year on year.

And, you know, we were breaching it before this latest package of support was announced.

So that additional spending is itself going to further feed inflation in the economy.

We saw this, the impact of the government's repeated one-off measures in response to the Ukraine crisis.

So this package itself is itself going to be inflationary.

And that's likely then going to impact those lower income households more because lower income households spend a greater proportion of their income

on things like food and fuel compared to richer households who can well afford these price increases.

It is.

And, you know, that's the problem with this.

The government are talking about, you know, these are temporary and time-limited measures.

But it's really difficult to unwind things like excise reductions.

And, you know, again, we look at some of the measures that came in in the last crisis, the VAT cut on gas and electricity, for example, even before this crisis.

and that was temporary announcement but that was extended out to 2030 and so it's really difficult to unwind this and I think there is a perception that you know we can afford to do it because we have all these corporation tax receipts we have all this money to spend you know why don't governments spend it and the trade-offs are often ignored in in this context and

Really, the problem with our finances at the moment is that although on paper we came into this year with a budget surplus, if you remove what we call those windfall corporation tax receipts, so that money that we cannot guarantee will continue at that same level into the future, we're actually running a deficit of more than $13 billion last year.

So now the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council

have found that actually those corporation tax receipts are even more concentrated than we thought they were so there are just three firms three foreign multinational firms who pay half of the corporation tax receipts in in ireland and that's that's basically an eighth of government revenue so you know while we're planning to increase this this spending more

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