John Lahart (Dublin South West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Thank you, Chair. I do not think I will use them. I have a number of questions. I am going to focus a little bit on housing from a budgetary point of view. When the IFAC was here the last time, it had some interesting points to make with regard to the difficulty and complexity of addressing the housing shortage. One of the issues raised was that the unemployment rate is at 6% and therefore, the amount of tradespeople left in that 6% is probably negligible. Therefore, from where will the trades come, that is, the tradespeople and the skills necessary to enable the building industry to gather the necessary momentum to deal with the crisis? Those skills and trades would have to be imported. Obviously, the difficulty with importing tradespeople is that they have to be housed. When we align that with one of the risks to the economy that IFAC suggested in terms of potential overheating areas, which is the building industry, it seems that the necessary workforce - even through the importation of skills - will take a long time to build up and to skill up, whether it is indigenous or imported. I wonder how realistic that risk is. We are nowhere near the kind of scale of building we are told we need. The witnesses might flesh that out a little bit.

My second question relates to the recent suggestion of my own party that I think might have been misunderstood. I would like to hear the view of the witnesses on it - not a party political view on it, but their objective view on it. The policy looked at the reduction of the VAT rate for building. A Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government report published today again reinforces the notion that building is not economical up to a certain point and scale. It cites apartments and how a builder has to go six storeys and beyond for it to be economical. The proposal put forward was there would be a sunset clause of two or three years and that a reduced VAT rate would be specifically aimed at those developers who were constructing affordable housing. Any loss in the VAT would be offset by the additional revenue that would be accrued through the construction of such housing. Those are two initial questions on housing.

I have one question on corporation tax arising from Mr. Coffey's report. To what extent do the witnesses think the concentration of corporation tax revenue in a small numbers of taxpayers is a revenue risk? I have a more of a philosophical question than anything else. The solution to the corporation tax issue is really a global approach, yet we are now seeing a drift towards nationalism in some of the major economies of the world. Do the witnesses have any overview comments to make on that?