Continuing Large Budget Surpluses

In recent years, the Irish public finances have been faced with the need to provide for short-term but often substantial government expenditure policy responses to a number of external shocks, including Brexit, COVID-19 and both the Ukrainian humanitarian and Cost of Living crises. The framework adopted by the Department of Finance (DoF) has been to separate out the use of temporary ‘non-core’ measures to meet these short-term additional resource requirements, from the ongoing day-to-day ‘core’ expenditure of government departments.