Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I would have appreciated if Deputy D'Arcy had addressed the motion in full. If he wanted to give full information for accuracy, and I have made this point in the Dáil Chamber, what it actually called for was the abolition of the USC and the reinstatement of the health levy and the income levy. The point I made earlier is that when the previous Government of Fianna Fáil introduced the USC, it kicked in at a level of €4,004. That is the reason behind the statement that Deputy D'Arcy read out in terms of the USC's lack of progressivity, because what it replaced were taxes that did not kick in at that lower level. That is why we opposed it and wanted to reintroduce the existing measures. That is just a point of accuracy. That being said, it is interesting that when we argue that €462 million worth of tax should be imposed or maintained on the populace, we are accused of being populist. Usually, a person is accused of being populist when he or she is trying to cut taxes or do something that is very popular. We know that abolishing the USC was a popular issue with many people. However, in the debate that took place, people realised that it was not affordable.

The last point I was going to make before the suspension was about the suggestion that has been put forward that abolishing this measure in the Finance Bill is better than the non-indexation of tax bands, and that if we did not do anything in the Finance Bill, people would be worse off. That is not true. Again, let us be accurate. We would have to introduce a measure in the Finance Bill to index taxation bands. If we did nothing in the Finance Bill, then we would have €462 million of revenue in a full year which we as a State could decide whether to inject into vital public services. It is not a case of either-or. Again, this is a presentation of statistics or comments being suggested that they are facts, and they are not. Deputy D'Arcy said that we have spent a lot of time on this. That time has not been spent on this section as a whole. Let me be clear. This section costs the Irish State €462 million every single year from here on in. How many minutes have we spent on it? About 20 or 30 minutes. If the Deputy does not want to spend ample time discussing nearly half a billion euro of tax cuts in a full year every year, I would suggest that he is in the wrong job. That is what happened in previous Governments when we cut taxes to an unsustainable level without due regard to the consequences that would flow from it.