Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Has the Minister compared, from a financial point of view, the efficiency of direct build as against HAPS? Direct build gives the State an asset and revenue stream, whereas the HAPS payment is money out that we do not recoup. Has the Minister done any mathematics on that?

Again on housing and property, given the limited fiscal space and the need to raise revenue for housing and other things does the Minister not think that we should seek to have a form of landlords' tax or some taxes to get back some of the enormous profits that have been made by people in the property sector, such as landlords, vulture funds and so forth? Does the Minister think it is acceptable that he cannot even give us figures, unless he can do so today unlike in reply to questions I and others have asked to date, on how much tax will be forgone on the section 110 tax break? Everybody knows we are talking about hundreds of millions, if not billions, of euro. Does the Minister consider it fair or acceptable that we do not know how much tax is forgone under that tax break? Should we not seek to put special levies or taxes on that profit to give us some extra revenue?

Has the Minister thought about or considered increasing employers' PRSI as another source of potential revenue? We have one of the lowest levels of employers' PRSI in Europe. It is probably one of the big differences between our tax regime and the regimes of other countries in Europe. Last year, for example, we proposed that if there was a higher PRSI band for employers' PRSI for people earning over €100,000 it would raise €600 million. Has the Minister looked at this? Our proposal was costed by the Minister's Department.

A number of people have given evidence to the committee on many of the tax expenditures generally, such as research and development tax expenditures, REITs, losses brought forward and pension-based tax reliefs.

One witness suggested there is in excess of €20 billion of tax expenditures. Has the Minister forensically looked at these and assessed whether they are good ways to expend tax revenue rather than changing them and getting extra revenue? Will the Minister get rid of the help-to-buy scheme?