Budget 2026
Dail Éireann — 2026-02-12
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Jack Chambers (FF), Dublin West

To take the Deputy's business model analogy, businesses do not do ELS as he has sought in his question. Businesses look at the totality of expenditure and to drive better delivery, better outputs and better efficiency in terms of the totality of spend. That is exactly what we are seeking to do in how we framed and delivered budget 2026. That is where the weaknesses of existing levels of service are identified and we now focus on the totality of expenditure rather than only the incremental budget package, which has been the nature of it in previous years. That places reform, efficiency and value for money at the centre of decisions we make and shifts the emphasis from the expenditure level towards what policies are being advanced, what services are being delivered and how funding supports a growing population. That is where, in terms of the ELS, there is an inconsistency across Votes. Just sitting additional expenditure above a system that might be inefficient in a particular expenditure area does not address the need to better link output. What we are trying to do and how we have changed the expenditure approach is to extract better outputs around how we manage the totality of expenditure, aligned with the point the Deputy has made.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-02-12/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-10-05T01:00:56+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-02-12