Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister and thank his officials both from Revenue and the Department in assisting me and my party in preparing our alternative budget.

I know that this is the first time the Minister has appeared before the committee. I look forward to him enlightening us when he has made up his mind whether to appear before the Committee of Public Accounts.

I would like to get into some of the issues before us. I have a long list and obviously will not have enough time to deal with all of them. The work of the committee should be evidence-based. As the Minister mentioned, we all have our own political opinions on the USC. We have engaged in a thrash-about, but Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and the Labour Party broadly agree on the USC.

When we investigated the banking crisis, a number of eminent individuals produced reports and it was called the group-think or herd mentality. Is there any paper within the Department of Finance, the Central Bank, the European Commission, the IMF, the ESRI or the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council in which the Minister is advised that it would be prudent to abolish the USC over a period of time?