Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Very tight. When the Minister references the European Commission which has a figure of 14% because it is a party to the EUROSTAT figures, they are referring to taxes on capital. However, when they talk about corporations, the figure is 6.8%. If one looks at Germany, for capital it has a rate of 20.7% and 17.1% as the implicit rate. We need to get behind these figures. What is the corporation tax rate and what are the overall taxes on capital? It is slightly different if that is what the Minister is talking about. One could make the same argument about income tax. One could talk about the effective rate of income tax, but we should not forget that stealth charges increase the overall burden of taxation on the individual. As one can start playing with figures, we need to have a detailed discussion where everything else would be up for grabs. There is no one area that should be off limits for discussion purposes or that we must tiptoe around. That discussion needs to happen urgently, given the financial problems the country faces.