Noonan’s giveaway budget ‘amounts to €3bn’

Finance Minister Michael Noonan will announce one of the largest ever pre-election giveaway budgets tomorrow, because his measures will effectively amount to €3bn, double the amount the Coalition has long advertised, one of the country’s top economists has said.

Conall Mac Coille, chief economist at Davy Stockbrokers, said the “enormous” increase in spending of €1.5bn the Government announced over the weekend and which it said will be allocated to departments for spending in the last few weeks of this year will actually lead to a doubling of the total of the 2016 budget measures, to €3bn.

Early on Saturday, the Department of Finance published its White Paper on Estimates of Receipts and Expenditure detailing the amounts it plans to spend on so-called supplementary budgets across health, transport, education and social welfare, in the final weeks of 2015.