Poor Charlie McCreevy. Most company finance directors would be delighted to be overseeing an enterprise so flush with cash. But when you're Minister for Finance, a bulging purse means that everyone is looking for a few bob.

If he were a director of a company, then his shareholders would be pressing him to distribute the money in dividends to them. What about a cheque for £226 for every man, woman and child in the Republic?

The Minister will plead, of course, that what he is doing with the money - using it to pay down the national debt - is effectively reducing the burden on future taxpayers.

He could certainly have used the money to meet some of the demands on the Government in areas such as the health service or public sector pay.

The large surplus could have funded higher spending for a period, but the danger in pushing up day-to-day spending is that the bills keep coming in. And he would have worried that when the economy turned down, money would not be available to pay for the higher level of spending. He would, perhaps, have been on firmer ground if he had decided to spend some of the extra millions on infrastructure projects such as roads, houses, public transport or schools and colleges. The trouble here is the Government is already pushing up spending sharply in these areas.

And what about taxes? Mr McCreevy could have had a more generous tax package in the 1998 Budget and, on the basis of the tax trends, in 1999. However, he would have feared this would add further fuel to the economy and, like extra spending, tax reductions once given cannot be taken back and must be paid for every year.