Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The Minister cannot have it every which way to suit his own narrative. Nobody is disputing the fact that those payments needed to be made. Indeed, they were vital and the right thing was done by the Minister and his colleagues in Government at the time. However, there had to be a legal basis for making those payments. The Minister accepts that the undisputed legal basis for that is section 202 of the Social Welfare Consolidation Act 2005. Indeed, that is what we are talking about here. It is the section to which section 3 of the Bill relates. Section 202 is about supplementary welfare allowances in cases of urgency, that is, urgent needs payments. It does not deal with anything else. The Minister cannot state that the legal basis on which the Government paid out hundreds of millions of euro in payments is section 202, but it is not actually section 202. He cannot have it both ways. There must be a legal basis on which to pay money out. This is what we are dealing with. We are dealing with the law and, therefore, that is what is required here. What the Minister is asking the committee to do is to wind back the clock so that people who lost their jobs during a pandemic are taxed. Legally, they are not taxed at this point in time for payments made from 13 March up to 5 August. That is what the Minister is asking the committee to do. He is asking us to breach a principle in a way that I have never seen in my ten years dealing with finance Bills. He is not asking us to do it because some of the big accountancy firms have found loopholes to allow people to make hundreds of millions of euro by avoiding paying taxes. He is not asking us to do it because of how real estate investment trusts, REITs, are exploiting the housing market or how vulture funds go without paying any tax by using charitable status and section 110 of the Taxes Consolidation Act. He is not asking us to do any of that. Rather, he is asking us to impose tax on people who lost their jobs during a pandemic. Those people lost their jobs because restrictions that had to be introduced by the Government forced their places of employment to close down. In the main, these are not high earners. A person who had a total income of €23,850 this year will now pay up to an additional €1,470 because of the amendment being made by this section.

Let me just explain this to the Minister because he came out with his €1 figure earlier. Consider the person who was in employment and earning €532 per week, which is not a very high income at all and is well below the average wage. If that person earned this during the period outside of 13 March to 5 August, he or she will now have a taxable income of €1,470 as a result of the amendment in this section. This is not euro and cents. This is about imposing a charge on people who have lost their jobs. This individual would have a total income in 2020 of €23,850. That is the reality. It is the upper end. It is the reality for a lot of people.

I asked the Minister a question earlier on how many times he, as the Minister for Finance, had brought forward an amendment to the Finance Act that actually asked us to rewind back time and tax income in this way? By God, he never did it for the vulture funds and by God he did not do it for the banks when they were carrying forward their losses. He did not do it for REITs, for section 110 companies or for others who were exploiting Finance Acts and finding holes to avoid paying tens of millions of euro in taxes. I can give examples, and I have given the ICAV example. Not once did the Minister suggest that we rewind back time and clamp down on those individuals. For the people who lost jobs in this pandemic, however, it is easy game and a "let us go for them" approach. The Minister is turning back time and taxing payments to people who lost their jobs in a pandemic: not the people who are milking the system and not those people who are trying to find a way out of it. These are people who are trying to keep their heads above water. The Minister is asking us to do something, the principle of which should not be countenanced by any Minister for Finance. Considering the amount of money, collectively and in the context of everything else, that would be accrued by this amendment, it is unbelievable that this principle will be breached. It speaks volumes of the Minister's priorities about who he clamps down on with these types of matters. I will definitely not support this. I appeal to the Minister and to every other person on this committee with regard to what is being asked of us here. No matter what is said about retrospective changes, we can read. We are being asked to apply this measure not from today's date, not from a date in November or from when the Finance Bill was introduced, and not from a date of the budget, which would be the normal practice in a number of circumstances, but from 13 March 2020. Perhaps the Minister will enlighten us as to why he has not done this for any of those other tax avoidance measures.