Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

-----in respect of refundable tax credits. I refer to the previous speaker's query. This is a difficult issue.

It is obvious that the poorest families in Ireland are those where everybody is out of work. Those families are also likely to have people with disabilities or medical needs of different kinds. Without a great deal of education and training, the capacity in the family to work is low. Another aspect concerns the high cost of childcare. There have been some small improvements regarding early years education. The Minister spoke earlier, as well as in the budget, about being a centrist. The crisis for centrists in thriving economies is that there is a problem with very low income people at work. Have the Minister or the Revenue Commissioners considered people in that situation, who, to use the words of the Taoiseach, get up in the morning and go out to work? Many people get up in the middle of the night, because they are carers, and then work very hard.

One of the ways to help such families would be to have refundable tax credits. That idea is not without its flaws, but nothing in this system is perfect. Is it possible for the Revenue to do that? What are the Minister's thoughts on that? I ask that because we have people, whom we will discuss later, earning high incomes in receipt of large tax exemptions. We are now talking about small money for people on low incomes and who also have significant home care responsibilities. We do not seem to be able to do anything to make sure that those people get everything in the tax code that can be provided to them.