Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I concur with what Deputy Farrell said about the seagoing naval personnel credit. This has been discussed and I just wanted to add my voice to what was said.

We are also dealing with Deputy Denis Naughten's amendment. It appears that this is inserting a new section so that is the one to which I want to speak.

The amendment relates to remote working. I want to get an understanding from the Minister on the contribution that would be given by an employer. The Minister spoke of how it would be treated in respect of benefit-in-kind. Take the setting up of a work station in someone's home, given that the work station is probably owned by the employer, how would those allowances be offset against taxable income in any year? Is it like capital allowances, based on 12.5% or one-eighth per year? Is there merit in looking at enhanced capital allowance for this purpose? I would like to get a better understanding of how the business is able to offset some of that cost. That is one of the big challenges. I have spoken to people for whom working remotely was great for the first couple of weeks and then it was not so great because our homes are not equipped in a way that facilitates home working and some homes simply do not have the space and so on. There are also bigger issues around access to broadband and so on.

The other two issues I wish to raise are connected to issues around remote working. One is the cross-Border worker relief. This is something that has been thrown up as a result of the pandemic. There has been a suspension of the rules during this period. That was only Covid-related but we all know the trajectory, where there will be more people working from home. There are many benefits around that including carbon emissions and climate change. The issue is around an employee who, for example, lives in Donegal who works in a company in Derry. If they carry out any substantial amount of work for their company, they lose their cross-Border worker relief, whereas in the North, a scenario where someone is living in Derry and works for a company in Letterkenny, they would have up to 60 days where they can work from home for the company without losing the full entitlement of the cross-Border working relief. In the South, anything more than basic duties results in the loss of relief; there is no provision for even one or two days or anything up to 60 days. Is the Minister open to considering how we would facilitate cross-Border, or what are referred to as frontier, workers in future? There could be a limit in the number of days they can work from home without being double taxed, which is what happens if they are not given the relief.

My second point in not related to that but with to the issue of remote working. Remote working has advantages and disadvantages, as has been touched on, including how our cities and town centres will look in future. That throws up opportunities. Some European cities have grabbed those opportunities which arise with low density traffic and how they can reshape their city centres. Our cities were very much based on people commuting into them and working from them. My question relates to companies where their staff no longer need to work in those offices and may not even live within the State, say in the case of big IT companies such as Google which might be located in Ireland but their staff are working in Barcelona, London or wherever. Is the Department concerned about that type of trend? Has it looked at this from a taxation perspective?