Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I will not even take that because I have to go to the Business Committee now. My thanks to our contributors. This is such an important topic and I am pleased that we are starting to make it an issue.

One particular suggestion which came from Dr. Collins was about how we up the scrutiny on tax expenditure so that these measures start to be taken as seriously and scrutinised as intensely as the direct expenditures we have in the budget. A related issue is what our role might be in that regard on this committee.

Dr. Collins suggested that we take a theme. Will he elaborate on that point? Does he mean that we take a particular expenditure and look at it as an example and work our way through year by year and one by one? What does Dr. Collins mean by a theme? Personally, I favour taking a cross-section each year with two or three types of reliefs to bury in to. Obviously, we cannot do all 85 in any given year, although that would be useful, as Dr. Collins suggested. Perhaps he could amplify the point. Perhaps it was Dr. Roantree who said that along with the tax strategy papers we would have a more detailed budget book on tax expenditures, what they are, who they are going to and an analysis of each tax expenditure. For the benefit for the practical outworking of this discussion for our committee and for the budgetary process, perhaps the witnesses could elaborate on those points briefly.