‘Give IFAC powers to investigate spending calls by opposition parties’ – Heydon

The Irish Fiscal Advisory Council (IFAC) should be given increased powers to cost opposition spending demands, the chairman of the Fine Gael Parliamentary Party has said.

Deputy Martin Heydon was speaking after Seamus Coffey, the chair of IFAC, suggested expanding the role of the watchdog to examine opposition calls.

Mr Coffey made his comments at last week’s Budgetary Oversight committee after Deputy Heydon discussed his party colleague Peter Burke’s report into spending calls from Fianna Fáil for the first six months of the year which came to a staggering €4.35bn. Many more calls could not be costed.

Deputy Heydon said: “In the context of Fianna Fáil’s outrageous and unrelenting spending calls I believe IFAC should be given the power to interrogate the spending calls of opposition parties.

“My colleague, Deputy Burke, has done extensive work counting the cost of Fianna Fáil’s ‘spending for all’ approach. The party has called for some €24m a day since the beginning of 2019 – and this is conservative because many of their calls are vague by design and impossible to put a number on.

“More than a week since the report was made public, not a single Fianna Fáil representative has responded as to how they would pay for their €4.35bn spending calls. It is simply reckless.

“By giving a body like IFAC powers to examine the spending calls of all opposition parties, it would ensure voters are armed with the information they need about the promises being made by all parties.

“At the moment Fianna Fáil are able to adopt a ‘one for everyone in the audience’ approach to spending and it goes unchecked.

“It is easy to promise something for everyone if nobody is interrogating just how you will pay for it or what other areas might have to suffer as a result.

“This is typical Fianna Fáil of course – their only priority is returning to power at any costs – but the fact is, voters deserve better.

“The public deserve to know how Fianna Fáil will use taxpayers’ finances to meet all their demands, but it is clear they won’t be explaining themselves, so we need to look at other ways for them to be held to account on behalf of voters.

“At a recent committee meeting, where we witnessed Fianna Fáil deputies adopt a whiter than white approach to economic prudence, fooling absolutely nobody, I discussed this issue with Mr Coffey.

“He acknowledged that IFAC has a narrow mandate to assess the fiscal and macroeconomic plans as set out by the Government. But he said, in other countries, bodies with a similar mandate to IFAC, do similar work on the costings and plans set out by the opposition parties.

“He suggested that perhaps it might be worth considering in an Irish context having a broader costings function somewhere within our policy framework that offered that service.

“Following on from this I have written to the Minister for Finance Paschal Donohoe to ask him to review the powers of IFAC under the Fiscal Responsibility Act 2012 to allow them to analyse in detail opposition spending commitments,” Deputy Heydon concluded.