Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

While the Minister defends the issue of gold-plated pensions, I reiterate that 4,200 individuals, all earning more than €300,000 are benefiting from the taxpayer to the tune of €350 million in tax reliefs. Essentially the taxpayer is putting money into their pension pots.

I cannot stand over that. There are mechanisms. Yes, they have high incomes and they pay tax at the rate that is set down in law. The question here is how much we should subsidise somebody's pension. In my view, the policy objective should be to ensure that people are able to retire on a relatively comfortable income but when we are talking about the 1%, we are talking about a huge amount of pension tax relief that is skewed completely in their direction. It is wrong and inappropriate.

Within our taxation of pensions, we have upper limits which allow us to make sure it is not completely exploited by the top 1%. For example, there is a point where, when the fund gets to €2 million, people cannot avail of any other pension tax relief. There is an age limit restriction depending on the age of the individual, and the amount of income can be up to €115,000. By adjusting those, if we wanted, or if the Minister desired a policy that did not just put taxpayers’ money into the pockets of the 1% but actually had a more distributional impact in regard to this tax relief, we could alter those two issues to make sure that people on average incomes and even those on high incomes would not be impacted, but only those at the top, the 1% of income earners in the State. Let us remember that the other 99% would not be impacted, but the 1% should not be able to avail of as much pension tax relief as they currently are because they do not need it. That is the point I am making. For that reason, I will press the amendment.

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