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

Recent ESRI research has shown that inequality in Ireland has decreased since the advent of the downturn as the Government has sought to protect the most vulnerable sectors of society from the full impact of the downturn. Core social welfare payments have not been cut at all. Personal taxes have not been increased. Personal taxes have been reduced in this budget. This is to our credit, given that inequality has increased among many of our fellow EU member states and OECD countries. An analysis of the taxation measures in this budget, based on the ESRI's tax benefit model, known as Switch, indicates that all household deciles will gain from the income tax measures announced in budget 2015.

We have very limited resources. People forget very quickly that we inherited a banjaxed economy and a banjaxed fiscal situation when we came into government in March 2011. We have made some progress. I am not saying everybody is back in a position we would like them to be in. All I am saying is that we have reached a point now where rather than taking, we are able to give something back. I am outlining my personal policy position, as endorsed by the Government, on how we target the resources we have this year and those I hope we will have next year. I am saying to the Deputy that next year, we will mirror what we did this year. The ESRI has also found that the most vulnerable sectors of society were protected from the impact of the downturn, whereas the groups of people I am talking about - the squeezed middle and the coping classes - bore the bulk of the burden and carried the weight. If we were to draw up a hierarchy of who suffered the most, it is obvious that those who lost their jobs were hit hardest. The people who were forced into emigration involuntarily are the next cohort.

As well as the policy of targeting the squeezed middle to whom I have referred and whom I have defined in monetary terms as having wages and salaries between €32,000 and €70,000, I wanted the budget and these personal taxation measures in the budget to be also an instrument of economic policy. If we do this for three years the estimate is that it will add 15,000 jobs because it will remove blockages in the labour market due to personal taxation and 15,000 extra people will be at work at the end of a three-year cycle of approaching matters in this way. I would hope also that when the young people in Sydney or in London or in Boston look at the comparative tax taken out of their gross wages, they will not be totally put off coming back to Ireland and that they will not decide they cannot afford to come home. Even though the wages look similar, the personal tax take is too high in Dublin, Limerick or Donegal or wherever. I am trying to remove those barriers as well.

I am not asking the Deputy to agree with me but I am asking him that if he is attacking the set of policies I have outlined, he should attack those policies rather than attacking some presumption of policy which I do not pursue.