Dr Emma Howard

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

we're really relying on money that is not likely to be continued into the future.

And at a time when we've also got huge demands on our infrastructure and other long-term spending that needs to be done.