Michael Noonan: ‘EU statistics office should straighten out its rules’

Finance Minister Michael Noonan has taken a swipe at the EU’s statistics office and said it needs to “straighten out” its rules so Ireland can decide on its public spending for the coming years.

He said the way the European Commission and specifically Eurostat decided on spending flexibility was “very different” from individual countries, including France who “usually gave two fingers to the rules anyway”.

Mr Noonan was speaking at the plenary session of the national economic dialogue talks with unions and employers among others. He agreed there was a need for “investment in social and economic infrastructure”.

But Ireland was “inhibited” by restrictions on spending decided by the EU.

Flexibility on spending was important, noted the minister, and was something Germany, France, and Italy among nations and governments employed. But there was no point in getting that flexibility or changes to a spending programme at the end of it or halfway through.

“If you have any flexibility with breaking the rules… there’s no point in getting it at the end, unless you are a country like France who give the two fingers to the rules anyway,” the minister told those at Dublin Castle.

Fiscal rules and space for spending were based on structural deficits and “complex”, he added.

Ireland hopes to see spending restrictions lifted for budgets from 2019 onwards. Mr Noonan noted examples where Brussels, or specifically Eurostat, had changed the rules when “you’re half way across the river and you are committed to expenditure programmes”.

This included the statistic agency’s decision that funding for Irish Water could in fact not be off balance sheet and must be part of Ireland’s spending declarations.

Equally, Brussels decided that a preference share conversion by the Government must be classified as expenditure, he explained.

“Our ability to spend the money which we will have over the next three or four years is going to be dependent on…whether we are allowed to spend it under EU rules or not. They better straighten out their rule making... before decisions are taken, rather than pulling the plug when we are half way through…” added the minister.