Pat Rabbitte (Dublin South West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I don't accept that, Chairman, if you mean that I ought to have gone to the last conference before a general election and announced things that would be manifestly unpopular with the electorate. I wasn't minded to do that. But in this particular one, as the speech shows I said very clearly, that if resources permitted, this is what we propose to do. And we proposed to do it because we felt there was an inequity in terms of the cohort of people who got benefit each year, over the best part of ten years, from the tax system, disproportionately so, because they were high earners, and people on modest incomes didn't. And, you know, it was designed to be a small contribution to alleviate the burden on people on modest incomes.