In Politics by Numbers, broadcaster, author and spreadsheet stan Gavan Reilly takes a data deep dive into a political point of the week.     

A PECULIAR THING about the budget is that what you see only scratches the surface of what’s included. Those of us in the broadcasting world love to fixate on the Dáil speeches – partly because it’s visual, partly because it’s theatre, and partly out of tradition, harking back to when the whole thing wasn’t leaked to bejaysus first.

But what’s said in the chamber is a measly fraction of the full ballast of a budget, an advert without the terms and conditions. Budget Day also means the publication of hundreds and hundreds of pages of granular data across multiple technical documents. The devil is in that detail –as it was, for example, two years ago when they included the infamous €9 million fund for phone pouches.

If you listened only to the speeches from Simon Harris and Jack Chambers you wouldn’t have heard that, for the first time since the pandemic, Ireland will run a deficit next year. You would only have heard a passing reference to why: the existence of two long-term national savings funds that we are, by law, obliged to top up with billions of euros every year.

You wouldn’t have heard at all that we’re putting more into it next year than the law even obliges us to – and nowhere in the budget documentation would you have learned that putting money into long-term savings… actually costs us money.

Fool us once, shame on us

Michael McGrath’s final budget three years ago might end up being one of the most consequential in our post-bailout history. Somewhat unexpectedly, Ireland found itself awash with corporation tax – at a level that few would have........

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