Irish gov't achieves fiscal surplus for 2nd quarter in a row

DUBLIN, July 20 (Xinhua) -- The Irish government achieved a fiscal surplus of close to 300 million euros (about 305 million U.S. dollars) in the first quarter (Q1) of this year, said the country's Central Statistics Office (CSO) on Wednesday.

This is the second quarter in a row that the Irish government has reported a fiscal surplus since the COVID-19 pandemic broke out in the country in the first quarter of 2020, showed the CSO figures.

The fourth quarter of last year saw a surplus of 4.1 billion euros for the Irish government for the first time since the outbreak of the pandemic.

In the first quarter of this year, the revenue of the Irish government stood at 24.15 billion euros, up 25.6 percent year-on-year while its expenditure witnessed a year-on-year decrease of 6.8 percent to 23.87 billion euros, with the revenue exceeding the expenditure by nearly 280 million euros.

The increase in revenue was driven primarily by a 4-billion-euro growth in tax revenues, while the decrease of expenditure was mainly because of the reduction in the state subsidies for people who lost their jobs due to the pandemic, said the CSO.

In Q1 2022, the Irish government spent 200 million euros under its Pandemic Unemployment Payment compared to the 1.8 billion euros spent in the same period of 2021.

The CSO figures also showed that at the end of the first quarter of 2022, the total debt of the Irish government stood at 234.9 billion euros, down for the fourth quarter in a row.

The general government gross debt to GDP ratio in Ireland stood at 53.1 percent at the end of Q1 2022, compared with 60.5 percent at the end of Q1 2021, said the CSO. (1 euro=1.018 U.S. dollars)