The National Development Plan is not a simple capital investment programme. What it does is to set out in some detail proposals for investment in the future of our society - but in this context the word "investment" means much more than capital investment.
Indeed, only about half of the money it is proposed to spend over the next seven years consists of capital investment - a fact that is not explained, let alone highlighted, in the document published last week.
A further difficulty is that comparisons with what the ESRI, in its "National Investment Priorities 2000-2006" of last March, proposed should be spent under various headings are made extremely difficult by the complicated presentation of the material.
First of all, in order to give an impression of regional planning, some of the expenditure provisions are extracted from the relevant national investment chapters and are set out in two separate chapters dealing with the two regions into which the State has been somewhat artificially divided for the purpose of maximising EU funding.
As a result, in order to arrive at a total figure for proposed expenditure under any given heading, e.g., roads, industry and water supplies, one has had to add the regional expenditure figures for these items back into the incomplete national totals.
And in a number of cases this is made difficult, even impossible, by the fact that items listed in the regional chapter have no corresponding headings in the national figures.
Next, the plan includes provision for health capital spending, for childcare, and for the CAP rural development measures - none of which was included in the ESRI document.
A further complication exists in relation to education. In the plan, educational initiatives are lumped in with training, and are treated in such a way as to make it impossible to assess whether or to what extent the ESRI's proposals to focus on educational disadvantage have really been taken on board by the Government.
Too much should not be made of the fact that the National Plan proposes to spend, during the next seven years, £10 billion more than the ESRI had proposed. In fact, comparing like with like as far as possible, the net expenditure difference between the two documents comes to about £6.5 billion, or about £900 million a year.
First of all, expenditure on the roads programme is virtually to be doubled, from the current level of £500 million a year to more than £950 million. That compares with the figure of £700 million a year proposed by the ESRI.
Investment in transport facilities is to be increased 21/2 times above its present level, to £360 million a year - twice the figure proposed by the ESRI.
Much of this excess is accounted for by the provision in the plan of a contingency of £500 million to cover the possible cost of the Luas tunnel from St Stephen's Green to Broadstone, as well as a "longer-term rail development programme".
The plan also includes £140 million for investment in Bus Eireann's provincial system. The ESRI made no provision for this, possibly because such bus services, whether in public or private ownership, should be capable of becoming viable and of developing without further State investment.
The proposals in the plan for investment in water supplies and waste disposal also run well above the level proposed by the ESRI.
The plan also proposes a very much larger programme of social housing than the ESRI suggested - £6 billion as against £3.4 billion.
It is important to note in this connection that the ESRI proposed that this social housing programme be largely financed by eliminating housing grants and housing tax reliefs - provisions which are currently helping to push up house prices.
Such a decision would yield £2 billion over the period and, if by any chance the Government were not prepared to take this overdue step, then in terms of available resources the plan would cost £8.5 billion more than the ESRI proposals, rather than the £6.5 billion excess which appears on the face of the figures.
Instead of accepting the ESRI recommendation to cut back somewhat on spending on training, an actual increase on the current level of spending is proposed. Over the seven years of the plan this will add a questionable £1 billion to the sum suggested by the institute.
Additional spending under all these headings appears to be partly offset by lower-than-proposed amounts for investment in industry, agriculture and cultural and recreational activities.
WHILE no distinction between current and capital spending is made in the plan, it seems clear that the great bulk of the excess over the ESRI-recommended expenditure will take the form of capital investment.
To implement such an expanded investment programme will require some revision of the allocation of projected future national resources that was proposed by the ESRI in its recent Medium-Term Review.
Now it may well be contended that the provision the institute made for reductions in taxation in the review were over-generous and that, consequently, over this seven-year period taken as a whole the diversion of a further £1 billion (about 1.5 per cent of GNP) from tax cuts to public investment should be feasible.
There is some truth in this, but what might be true of the planning period as a whole is not necessarily true of the initial couple of years.
Especially in the light of the kind of tax cuts being talked about for next year in the context of the current National Agreement discussions, the scale of the short-term increase in capital and current spending proposed by this plan over the next two years - roughly an annual addition of £1 billion - is certainly disturbing.
For, quite apart from the fiscal implications of such a sudden jump in public spending at a time when taxes are also likely to be cut sharply as part of the negotiation of a new pay round, it is in any event doubtful whether the physical resources exist to move so rapidly to such a high level of activity.
And if they don't, then trying to do too much too soon could have serious inflationary effects.
It is, frankly, somewhat surprising that the radical expansion of the ESRI proposals, especially during the first couple of years of the plan, should have secured the ready support of the Minister for Finance, Mr McCreevy, and of the PD Ministers in the Government who have been accustomed to urge tight control over public spending.
It will be interesting to see what the 2000 Estimates look like after the inclusion of these additional provisions.
It is also surprising that the massive scale of these proposed spending increases has attracted so little public attention. One must hope that the confused presentation of the data in the National Plan will not indefinitely deter serious discussion.
Garret FitzGerald can be contacted at gfitzgerald@irish-times.ie