Jul 7, 2026 · 46 min · 15 segments
Minister for Public Expenditure Jack Chambers joins Gavan to discuss another strong month of corporation tax receipts has boosted the Government’s finances ahead of Budget 2027, but a looming threat…
Gavan ReillyHost
Jack ChambersGuest
Kate EnglishPanelist
Elaine BurkePanelist
I'm joined now with the panel in studio, special correspondent with the Irish Examiner, Mick Clifford; uh, Elaine Burke, who's the host of the For Tech Sake podcast; and chief economist at Deloitte, Kate English.
Just scan the QR code that's on your screen right now, and you get in touch with us, uh, via WhatsApp.
Um, the, the takeaway for me from that discussion with Jack Chambers was this idea that apparently money is maybe not drying up, but the idea that there is less to put towards new things in future.
And I, I don't know how you can square an announcement that there'll be 7 billion in new spending next year, and look at the public s- sector records that show that tax is going great and spending is actually lower than expected, and tell people that money is drying up somehow.
The key message for people to understand here is that when we talk about public expenditure or government spending, it's that not all spending is equal.
We speak about the breakdown between current expenditure and capital expenditure.
Current expenditure, as Minister Chambers mentioned, is your day-to-day expenditure.
It's something that keeps the economy going from day to day, but it's not really expenditure that invests in our future.
Capital expenditure is our expenditure on the other side of the field, uh, which does invest in our future.
It's everything that we look at, from infrastructure to housing, and that is the area that, frankly, we probably haven't spent enough on over the past number of years.
In Budget 2026, capital expenditure was just 16% of our overall budget, but that's down from a low point of just over 3% back in 2014, 2015.
So there's an argument for that, yes, we need to, uh, curtail or constrain to some degree the volume of expenditure we have on the current side, but actually government could do with being braver-
I'm joined now with the panel in studio, special correspondent with the Irish Examiner, Mick Clifford; uh, Elaine Burke, who's the host of the For Tech Sake podcast; and chief economist at Deloitte, Kate English.
Just scan the QR code that's on your screen right now, and you get in touch with us, uh, via WhatsApp.
Um, the, the takeaway for me from that discussion with Jack Chambers was this idea that apparently money is maybe not drying up, but the idea that there is less to put towards new things in future.
And I, I don't know how you can square an announcement that there'll be 7 billion in new spending next year, and look at the public s- sector records that show that tax is going great and spending is actually lower than expected, and tell people that money is drying up somehow.
The key message for people to understand here is that when we talk about public expenditure or government spending, it's that not all spending is equal.
We speak about the breakdown between current expenditure and capital expenditure.
Current expenditure, as Minister Chambers mentioned, is your day-to-day expenditure.
It's something that keeps the economy going from day to day, but it's not really expenditure that invests in our future.
Capital expenditure is our expenditure on the other side of the field, uh, which does invest in our future.
It's everything that we look at, from infrastructure to housing, and that is the area that, frankly, we probably haven't spent enough on over the past number of years.
In Budget 2026, capital expenditure was just 16% of our overall budget, but that's down from a low point of just over 3% back in 2014, 2015.
So there's an argument for that, yes, we need to, uh, curtail or constrain to some degree the volume of expenditure we have on the current side, but actually government could do with being braver-
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.