Bumper €1.5bn spend to woo voters

The Coalition last night significantly raised the stakes in its pre-election preparations after disclosing plans to splash an additional €1.5bn in gross supplementary spending across health, transport, education, and social protection — all by the end of this year.

The huge amounts of additional expenditure will be allocated to departmental budgets and will go to fund new policy measures on the likes of transport, as well as to plug a huge €600m overrun in the health budget in the current year.

That the Government planned additional expenditure in supplementary budget spending this year was well known. There is however, no disguising the scale of the additional spending and plans to spend €1.5bn gross in additional spending would not have been seen since the supplementary budgets in the boom years.