Michael Noonan (Limerick City, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Our policy position on the financial transactions tax has developed over a period of time. As the Deputy will be aware, the ESRI and the Central Bank developed a paper on the financial transactions tax at my request when it became clear that certain European countries were going to push the matter fairly hard. I wanted the advice I was getting within the Department of Finance to be supplemented by an examination of the possible impact on Ireland of the financial transactions tax, as then envisaged in the Commission paper. We got the paper from the ESRI and the Central Bank and it was published on our website last June.