Dr. Seán Healy:

I thank all the members who made interesting points in that context. There are many points I could respond to but we must pick and choose what we can respond to. I would make the point that we were asked to speak about pre-budget audits, their pluses and minuses and so on. We focused on that rather than on our pre-budget submission which members have already but there are connections between the two of them. For example, on Deputy Collins's point about ring-fencing, we do not believe there should be any reductions in welfare or in child benefit. We have argued that that should not be the case but we have shown the reason we make that case. Not only have we shown how the Government can reach its borrowing requirement reduction of €3.5 billion as required by the troika while protecting the vulnerable and those who are poor but we presented fully costed proposals across the system. Central to that is the change in the ratio between expenditure cuts and increases in taxation. We very much agree with TASC in the analysis of what is going on in tax, and that Ireland is a very low tax country.

It is not so much about targeting the income tax sector as about having a broader tax base with a fairer tax system and higher tax take.

When we talk about tax in this context, we are talking about all charges, social insurance payments and all payments that are made locally and nationally. A pre-budget audit would eliminate the nonsensical arguments. Many of the issues to which kites are attached are not very well grounded. We know the numbers but the people talking about the numbers flying around in the media have no idea about them, the costs or implications. A pre-budget audit system would result in the kind of analysis required.

A problem that is undermining many of the efforts to make progress, even within what the Government has done up to now, which we welcome, is atomisation. This results in only one issue being dealt with. The Government is just finishing putting into place legislation on the fiscal council. Why do we not have a social council to examine social impacts? Why have we five people with backgrounds in economics, and who are being afforded priority, considering the impacts and making recommendations to the Government and nobody examining the impacts in the special-needs area or any of the other areas that organisations such as TASC and ours are highlighting? There is nobody else outlining the consequences of the route the Government is taking. The Government and entire political process would benefit from having a pre-budget audit process.