Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Thursday, 18 June 2015
Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis
Nexus Phase
Mr. John Moran:
No, I didn't try to minimise it at all, I just tried to put it into a context, right? We had a ... two things happening at the same time, right, in terms of what went on in Ireland. What I was trying to explain is that if we didn't have the vulnerabilities in our fiscal situation, which didn't need to be there just because there was a property bubble, right, we could have not had our tax revenues based on stamp duty. We could have had the same level of property sector taxation on ... which, rather than being a transaction-based stamp duty, could have been a recurring property tax. One thing I would have known and my predecessor would have known is that, despite the crisis, there would still have been income related to property coming in. It would have dropped because the values would have dropped, but we would have still had something. Instead we had zero.
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