Sinn Féin gets its sums wrong

Sir, – I think The Irish Times is being a little unfair to Sinn Féin’s number crunchers. You reported recently on documents compiled by the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform which show that the party’s costing of its alternative Budget 2024 was tens of millions of euro wide of the mark (“Sinn Féin got its sums wrong when calculating its alternative budget, say finance officials”, Business, March 3rd).

The example quoted showed Sinn Féin estimating the cost of not proceeding with a carbon tax increase at €141 million while the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform put the cost at €47 million.

Of course a miscalculation of €94 million isn’t nothing but being wrong by a factor of three is a significant upgrade on the hole in Sinn Féin’s manifesto for the 2020 general election. Readers will recall Mary Lou McDonald heroically explaining to Bryan Dobson on RTÉ how doubling the vacant site levy, as proposed in her party’s manifesto, would cause a tax which yielded less than €900,000 in 2019 to contribute €107 million to the coffers of a Sinn Féin-led government.

Being wrong now by a mere factor of three is a much better effort. But there is still room for improvement. – Yours, etc,