budget 2024

Revealed – the €14.4bn budget trick

Behind the ‘prudent’ core Budget 2024 package of €6.4 billion lie shadow ‘temporary’ spending figures that bring the real total to a less reassuring €14.4 billion

Michael McGrath, the Minister for Finance and Paschal Donohoe, Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform. ‘It will be a prudent budget,’ McGrath said during the summer. ‘But it will also seek to respond to the pressures that are there.’

Much has been made by this government of its prudent approach to the public finances as it heads into Budget 2024.

“It will be a prudent budget,” Michael McGrath, the Minister for Finance, said at the National Economic Dialogue during the summer. “But it will also seek to respond to the pressures that are there.”

The government must tread a careful line between spending enough to keep the country happy and addressing its needs but ...