Dr. Micheál Collins:

That is probably a pretty fair description of where the entire Irish taxation system was before the Commission on Taxation reported in 2009 in the sense that we had all these tax measures but did not even have a list of them. In a sense, that is a classic insight in terms of things being introduced and just falling into place.

The secretariat to that commission did some very hard work. It had to go through the Acts passed by the Oireachtas introducing those tax expenditures to gather up the list of them and then gather the estimated costs if they were ever mentioned. That is why I stated earlier that we have come on in leaps and bounds. By and large, we now have a comprehensive list which puts a committee like this in a very strong position to think about tax expenditures. The next step after making a list is looking at it and thinking about it. I would encourage the committee to begin to engage with that.

To come back to the gender budgeting point, there is no reason we could not think about some of the other objectives of tax expenditures. I am coming to the end of a piece of work looking at the gendered aspects of pension tax breaks. When it is finished, I will be happy to pass it on to the committee.