Ireland's national debt will be €10 BILLION higher than necessary within four years - simply because the government chose to abandon austerity last month.
The Irish Fiscal Advisory Council says it would have been far cheaper, in the long run, if the government had gone ahead with the original plans for spending cuts and tax increases last month.
The council - which is the government's own team of experts for budgetary matters - was one of many bodies urging the government to plough ahead with the original €2bn in cuts.
Its latest report, published this morning, suggests the government's been too focussed on simply meeting the EU's rules for closing the gap between income and spending - meeting the much vaunted target of "3 per cent" in 2015.
While the council says the deficit will stand at 2.7 per cent - well within the EU limits - it could have been under 2 per cent had the original plan been executed.
And damningly, it says the lost ground will have a major financial impact in the years ahead.
In fact it says that by 2018, as a result of the €2 billion in lost ground and the interest we'll have to pay on that borrowing, the national debt will be €10 billion higher than it would have been if the cuts had gone ahead.
Budget 2015 marked the "end of austerity" for the government, as it decided it could reach the EU's binding targets without needing to take any more money out of the economy.
As Today FM News has noted in the past, meeting the '3 per cent' limit would still mean running a deficit of roughly €5 billion.
Data published by the government in the run-up to Budget Day - before the government announced it was actually reversing austerity by putting more money into the economy - forecast a deficit of 2.4 per cent, or just over €4.7 billion.
Elsewhere, the council's latest report also complains that the Budget contradicts itself in some parts - and showed "an absence of a well-specified plan for the public finances beyond 2015".
It says that the Budget assumes a freeze in public spending for the years beyond 2015, while the Comprehensive Review of Expenditure - published on the very same day - forecast an increase in spending for many departments.
In either case, it says there is no guidance on how any spending increases between now and 2017 are to be paid for.
