God loves a trier. So there must be a special place in heaven reserved for the members of the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council who made another spirited attempt this week to nudge the Government towards a more prudent fiscal path. It looks like meeting with the same level of success as all the others.

On Wednesday, the council’s chair Seamus Coffey addressed the Oireachtas budgetary oversight committee on the subject of the Government’s medium-term fiscal strategy, published before Christmas.

Spending plans were accelerating, Coffey warned, leaving Ireland more, not less, vulnerable. Only one in seven euro of corporation tax revenue will be saved this year.

This is Coffey’s second term as chairman of the council, so he presumably knows the score at this stage. He and his colleagues have laboured long in the vineyard of fiscal prudence, without ever producing a bounteous harvest of budgetary caution.

The council was established back in 2011 when the country was reeling from the financial crisis and the age of austerity that followed. At that time, there was a desire for rules and mechanisms to avoid the budgetary mistakes which, while they did not cause the financial crisis, made it much worse here than elsewhere. Specifically, those mistakes included building up huge recurring spending commitments on the back of transient and unreliable tax revenues.

One young Government backbencher put it well during the Dáil debate on the legislation:

“To bring the issue down to brass tacks, the passage of this Bill will mark the maturing of our........

© The Irish Times