Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Section 202 does not mention means-tested or regular payments. The Government's argument is that, because the payments are regular and not means tested, they are not deemed as urgent needs payments. However, I welcome the Minister's clarification that the legal basis for paying out these hundreds of millions of euro was section 202 of the 2005 Act. I am not dismissing what he or the Minister, Deputy Humphreys, have said - theirs are the views of the Ministers of relevant Departments - but what have the Houses of the Oireachtas said is the legal basis for the payments? The legal basis is clear, in that they were made under section 202 of the 2005 Act, which section 13 of the Finance Act 2018 made tax exempt payments. Whatever about the Minister's intentions at the time, they were tax-exempt payments.

This is a very serious issue and is much wider than the Minister wanting to tax payments – I do not understand why – that were made to people who lost their jobs during the pandemic and to do so in a way that is unconventional. In debates on previous Finance Bills, I have stated that there should not be retrospective taxation. The only time that any parliament throughout the world should consider the principle of retrospective taxation is in very unique circumstances involving tax avoidance. There is no doubt about this case, though. Harken the views of the Ministers and consider the legal basis.

We are being asked in this section to apply retrospective taxation. Payments made to people who lost their jobs in the pandemic were tax-free in law. We are now being asked to rewind the clock, change the application of those payments and amend section 13 of the 2018 Act to make them taxable. This is a threshold that nobody in this House should be willing to cross, particularly to cross to tax payments for people who lost their jobs during a pandemic. This is a wider issue and a move we should not be countenancing.