Ireland’s strong jobs market has resulted in a 5.4% increase in income tax collected so far this year compared to the first two months of last year.<\/p>\n
Exchequer returns published by the Department of Finance show the State collected \u20ac5.9 billion in income tax so far this year.<\/p>\n
Value Added Tax (VAT), a key measure of consumer spending, was up 3.9% to \u20ac4.7 billion in the first two months of this year.<\/p>\n
So far this year taxes of \u20ac13.6 billion were collected, which represents 10.4% drop on the same period last year.<\/p>\n
However, when one-off payments made last year following the Apple tax case are stripped out, tax revenue for the first two months is marginally up by 1.1%.<\/p>\n
February is not generally a significant month for corporation tax, which has been driving huge increases in the amount of money collected by the State in recent years.<\/p>\n
There was an exchequer deficit of \u20ac1.8 billion for the first two months of the year due to payments made by the Government to two long term savings funds.<\/p>\n
So far this year there has been spending of \u20ac17.5 billion which is 5.2% ahead of last year.<\/p>\n
The Irish Fiscal Advisory Council has consistently warned the Government against excessive growth in expenditure.<\/p>\n
It said that so far in 2026, current spending is growing by 7%, a faster pace than the 5.8% rate forecast in the Budget. <\/p>\n
It added: “Current health spending is up 7.7% this year, compared to a Budget 2026 forecast of 4.8%. Most Departments are seeing spending rise faster than in Budget 2026.”<\/p>\n
Minister for Public Expenditure Jack Chambers said: “value for money remains a priority” and the Budget placed a “strong emphasis on the importance of delivery, efficiency and reform.”<\/p>\n
Minister for Finance Simon Harris said: “This is a time of unprecedented global uncertainty”.<\/p>\n
He added “it is more important than ever that we continue to reinforce our economic resilience by running surpluses, making transfers into the two funds, and keeping public spending under control”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ireland’s strong jobs market has resulted in a 5.4% increase in income tax collected so far this year…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":328989,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[72,113,61,60],"class_list":{"0":"post-328988","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-economy","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-economy","10":"tag-ie","11":"tag-ireland"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328988","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=328988"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328988\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/328989"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=328988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=328988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=328988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}