The Minister for Finance has insisted that the Government will not repeat the mistakes of the past in the upcoming budget.
Jack Chambers was speaking amid strong warnings from senior economists that the coalition is not adopting a sufficiently prudent approach to spending.
"We know from recent history the risks of relying on windfall tax revenues to fund day-to-day spending, and this Government is determined that we will not repeat the mistakes of the past," Minister Chambers told the Oireachtas Committee on Budgetary Oversight.
"We will not formulate budgetary policy on one-off revenues," he said of the €14bn due to the State following the Apple judgment.
But he confirmed that €3bn from the sale of State shares in AIB is now in a Government account, and that it would be used to address "infrastructure needs in the economy", the details of which would be revealed on budget day.
Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform Paschal Donohoe acknowledged that Government spending continues to exceed what it had planned for.
At the end of last month, "gross total voted spending was €63.6 billion - 4.3% above profile and 12.9% higher than the same period a year ago".
The key drivers were, he added, "health spending on the current side and housing and education spend on the capital side".
"These challenges continue to be assessed and reviewed as we progress the preparation of Budget '25."
While the Government's Net Spending Rule is "crucial in ensuring macroeconomic and fiscal sustainability" - and in preventing the economy from overheating - Robert Kelly, Director of Economics and Statistics at the Central Bank, told the committee that it "is not mentioned in this year's Summer Economic Statement".
"And the projections show noncompliance in 2025 and 2026," he noted.
Minister Donohoe said that the €14bn due from Apple should be spent as EU Regional Cohesion Funds were in previous decades, when Ireland was a net recipient of those monies.
"It's imperative that we make a decision regarding how we spend that money wisely, and when Ireland experienced a gain like this before, for example, in the money that was made available to us in Regional Cohesion funding," he said, that wise decisions "delivered benefits way ahead of what we could have hoped for".
"That's going to be a lot easier said than done, because any State agency, any Government department that spends money already believes they should have access to this money, and they should be spending it."
"[We] do have an awful lot of work to do in relation to this across to come in months."
'No easy way' to tackle housing shortage - economist
Sinn Féin's Spokesperson on Finance Pearse Doherty referenced the Central Bank's conclusions, published today, on the scale of house building needed to meet demand.
He suggested that the Government's approach "is failing" - a claim which Minister Donohoe rejected.
During sustained questioning, Deputy Doherty then accused Minister Chambers of deliberately speaking a "mistruth" on the tax benefits accruing to average workers in last year's budget.
Earlier, the committee heard that Ireland's "poor" performance in delivering infrastructure means that there is no quick fix for the housing crisis.
"We have had a market failure in construction for a full quarter of a century now," Co-Director of the Nevin Economic Research Institute Dr Tom McDonnell said.
"There's only two real big, big players, so we don't have a property competitive market which can produce those high levels of productivity that we want to have".
"In the short term, there is no there is no easy way out of this."
"Ireland is so poor" at delivering infrastructural projects, he added, and needs to look at other countries in "Europe and beyond" and ask, "what are they doing differently from what we're doing?"
Independent TD Sean Canney said that Uisce Éireann is "badly struggling" to provide water and waste water supplies to land zoned for housing, and that this is slowing down development.
He suggested that budgetary surpluses and one off windfalls could be used to tackle this.
But Michael McMahon, of the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council, warned against "throwing money at a constrained construction sector".
Conor O'Toole, of the Economic and Social Research Institute, flagged the dangers posed to the economy by "infrastructure bottlenecks in housing, the requirement to invest in climate-related actions, and population aging".
There is also a significant risk of inflation, including in "addressing these bottlenecks at full employment with capacity constraints," and he urged that restraint be exercised in particular around taxation policy.
"How much of inflation is profiteering? And don't we need to look at that," asked Solidarity-PBP TD Richard Boyd Barret, citing the Oireachtas "bike shed" which cost "more than a house".
Chairperson of the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council Seamus Coffey said that cost pressures, including on rent, "are similar to what we would have seen in the 2000s", during the Celtic Tiger years.
While Sinn Féin TD Rose Conway Walsh noted similarities in the various submissions, including the need to protect against a reduction in the corprate tax take, and an eventual downturn in the economy.
