Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Well, what I proposed in many of the debates and discussions ... and, in fact, ultimately, Brian Lenihan actually adopted an element of my proposals because we had many conversation, particularly when things went wrong for the country and, you know, he was concerned to try and do his best to salvage the wreckage. First of all, I spoke at length about the notion of a minimum effective tax rate. In other words, no matter how many allowances are available to an individual, particularly a high-income individual, we would ensure, or the State would ensure, that that person had to pay a minimum effective rate of tax. The second proposal was that some of the allowances I've spoken about should be capped and that in some cases they should be discontinued. I also proposed, Deputy, that there would be a standing committee on taxation, having previously proposed a study, which ultimately Deputy Cowen did actually carry out but didn't implement the recommendations, a study of the actual cost of tax expenditures. And I proposed that there be a standing commission committee on taxation which would continuously look at the costs of tax arrangements which had built up in the system because I believed that if there was more information available that it would have been possible to make better judgments and better decisions about how to manage the national finances responsibly.

In relation to the proposal about reducing-----