Dr. Seán Healy:

I take a similar approach to the state aid rules. We need to recognise that Ireland started out, when it joined the European Union, at something like 75% or 78% of the European average - our infrastructure is not at the European 15 average at all. I do not think anybody claims that it is and the same applies to our services. While we would like to have the best in Europe, people believe that we should have at least the European average. We have to recognise that we are substantially below that. Therefore, the state aid rules, the fiscal rules and other rules, as well as issues relating to bailouts, austerity and the speed at which we need to reduce debt and so on need to bear in mind that the country at the end of the day needs to put the infrastructure in place to give it the capacity to develop an economy and a society that can maintain itself through the various economic cycles that will come. We will have crashes in the future, just as we have had them in the past. That is the nature of the economic cycle.

On the third issue about not cutting taxes on middle-income earners, it is important to note what we have proposed. For example, we referred to things that would have made a difference to people on PAYE. Our budget submission proposed to increase the PAYE tax credit; to make tax credits refundable - that would have benefitted low-income people and not middle-income people, but it would have been very positive. We proposed standard rating so that the benefits of the tax breaks are at the same percentage meaning that somebody on 40% does not get twice the tax break for a pension, or whatever, that somebody on a lower income gets.

We also proposed reform of the research and development tax credit to remove the refund element of that. The most important one for us was to introduce a minimum effective corporation tax rate. We have no doubt that that can be done and it should apply to all profits coming through the country and not just what is declared to be profits by some grouping, whether that is a company, the Revenue, the Department of Finance or whatever.

We agree with tax on sugar-sweetened drinks, as well as taxing empty housing or underdeveloped land. We need to restore the windfall gain tax on rezoned land which had been introduced but was removed in 2015 just when it was starting to make some impact. It could not have made any impact before that - as there was no land on sale, there were no windfall gains. The introduction of a financial transactions tax was another example.

In the longer overall approach, we do not believe we need to go as far as even having the European average tax take as a percentage of GDP, but we need to move towards it. We are a long way below it; along with a few of the eastern European countries we are very close to the bottom in the European tax leagues. We need to change our approach in that context. Then we can make choices. For example, there are issues to do with resource taxes. We need to think more about how we address climate change and promote environmental protection through the tax system. There are many issues there.