The election campaign is only a week old. And like all newborns it is noisy and messy and not yet making much sense.
Much of the initial wailing has been about the vexed question of the fiscal space.
As Michael Noonan has noted, calculating the fiscal space is not high maths.
But the political handling of this issue has succeeded in generating extraordinary levels of confusion. Here are the facts:
On the day before the election was called, Sinn Féin launched an attack on Fine Gael, stating that its sums on spending did not add up.
Perhaps because it seemed such an unlikely scenario – that Sinn Féin, frequently dismissed as economic illiterates by their political opponents, was lecturing Fine Gael on its calculation of the fiscal space - the claim was pretty much entirely ignored.
The following day, as the election campaign stumbled to its feet, Sinn Féin was saying that Fianna Fáil and Labour were having trouble with their maths as well.
We set about investigating the claim.
It all came back to the new rules that the EU Commission can now impose on government spending.
The Department of Finance must now forecast how much money a government will have to spend every year after they have covered all the outstanding bills, while complying with these strict new parameters.
The Department did their sums and came up with a figure of €8.6 billion of available wriggle room over the next five years.
It’s based on the economy ticking along at a fair clip and may of course ultimately turn out to be very wide of the mark.
But at least it provides a base line and means that no politician can make wild promises that would overshoot the line for this election campaign.
Just in time for the election, word came from Brussels that the Commission was considering relaxing its rules around what would constitute a balanced budget.
If they did this, it would open up another €1.5bn of fiscal space – leaving us with a grand total of €10.1bn.
Ten days before the election was called, Mr Noonan told the Fine Gael Ard Fheis that the new fiscal rules "will limit new budgetary commitments to €12bn over the five years from 2017 to 2021".
The following Saturday, Public Expenditure and Reform Minister Brendan Howlin also told reporters that the fiscal space was €12bn.
He helpfully explained why this figure was so much larger than the €10.1bn figure agreed by the Department: "The indexation of taxation...will provide another two billion of fiscal space."
By that he meant that if the government doesn’t adjust the tax system in line with inflation, many taxpayers would slip into higher bands and the exchequer would end up collecting €2bn more in taxes.
On the day the election was launched Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin was also explaining how his party’s economic plans were based on the Department of Finance’s fiscal space figure.
He told RTÉ's Six One News: "If you don’t index [the tax bands] you get another two billion".
This is where their sums went awry.
The €2 billion they were adding on for not indexing the tax system had already been included in the Department of Finance’s €10.1bn.
Labour and Fianna Fáil were double-counting. It was that simple.
By the time they rolled out their economic plans this week, all references to this extra €2bn had been hastily erased.
Mr Noonan has repeatedly insisted that he was always crystal clear about how the fiscal space was calculated.
His €12bn was different from Brendan Howlin and Micheál Martin’s €12bn.
He says his €12bn was a macro figure which included some spending that had already been committed to, such as the public sector pay deal.
In other words, when Mr Noonan told the Ard Fheis there would be €12bn available for "new budgetary commitments", he knew that €2bn of that was in fact already spoken for.
So is Sinn Féin right to say they were "cooking the books?"
Well, Sinn Féin certainly deserves credit for spotting what the Minister for Public Expenditure and the Fianna Fáil leader failed to spot – and they will no doubt dine out on this for the remainder of the campaign and beyond.
But I don’t see how you can accuse either Fianna Fáil or Labour of cooking the books when it appeared that they were completely oblivious to their error until we contacted them.
Mr Noonan and Fine Gael have flatly denied that there was ever any issue with their maths.
And we have no evidence to suggest that there was.
But declaring that there was €12bn available for "new" spending when they knew the absolute maximum available for new commitments was €10.1bn certainly demands some explanation.
By RTÉ Prime Time's Katie Hannon
