Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

No, what I was strongly in favour of was an overall approach to the market which would have actually taken the tax incentives ... my understanding of the people who ran high net worth businesses, and I don't want to, under the Chairman's instructions, refer to any one particular person. The people who ran those businesses, Deputy, based the appeal for funds on the fact that the investors who invested into those funds would find, through the use of appropriate tax mechanisms, that they would, in effect, be shielded from almost all taxation, the kind of tax breaks I referred to. So, in literally hundreds of Dáil questions and comments, I urge the then Government to significantly reduce those either by capping them, by the use of minimum effective tax rates, and by ending them because some of them, in my view, were entirely inappropriate. There is a role of tax incentives but it has to be targeted, it has to be, in my view, temporary, and it has to be costed and that was my continuous position.