Seamus Coffey
speaker
117 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 17 Jul
Seamus Coffey’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Yeah, I think there was a lot in it.
And on the public finances in particular, I think the government and other agencies are clear that there's possibly a need to see some greater budgetary discipline over the coming years compared to what we've seen in recent years.
Now, we know what's happened.
That sort of ill discipline and failure to stick to budgetary parameters has sort of been covered up by these booming corporation tax receipts.
So even with fairly rapid increases in spending and even with significant overruns and within-year policy decisions, the public finance is at a headline level.
remain in strong shape.
Like there aren't many countries in Europe running surpluses and with declining debt ratios.
But I think that the key risk that's pointed out in the governor's letter and by others is these corporation tax receipts and the calculations done by the central bank show that if these excess or bumper receipts
corporation tax receipts were to be stripped out for one reason or another, then there would be a pretty significant deficit emerging within the public finances because the level of spending has been growing faster than what we might call the sustainable or underlying revenue of the economy, our typical income tax VAT.
Excise duties are standard corporation tax, not these bumper ones we've seen.
Now, the governor and nobody else seems to be making a prediction that these corporation tax receipts are likely to fall.
It's just that maybe we're becoming a bit too dependent on them.
I think some of them, there's certainly a lot of room for improvement, like the mention there of the supply side.
We know where there are clear bottlenecks in the economy, where things are sort of holding the capacity of the economy to expand due to shortages.
We can look at it in housing, for example, where clearly there are very significant issues across all areas of housing, but perhaps most particularly in...
in the private rental sector, where the squeeze is at its most acute, but also when it comes to housing for purchase, for home ownership and social housing.
So we need more of all types of housing.
We can also see it perhaps when it comes to infrastructure, transport, etc.
And also maybe with water, we see issues this week in the middle of summer with restrictions being placed on water use.
And maybe that is also perhaps holding back our capacity to expand the economy in certain areas.
Showing 1–20 of 117 · page 1 of 6
Next →