Professor Niamh Moloney:

I am acutely conscious of the busy evening members have so I thank them for their time. I appreciate it very much. I thank Deputy Farrell for her reflections. She raises a very important question. It is exactly the kind of question that a commission like ours is best positioned to look at. To do that kind of assessment, we need to stand back and take a longitudinal perspective. We also need to look at other systems. As Deputy Farrell mentioned, there are big debates around this right now. In 2021, in terms of where we are right now, if you look around most advanced economies, they are debating how tax systems work and, as Deputy Farrell mentioned, what is the balance between current income and consumption and different sources of capital and wealth. UCD does a huge amount of work in this area and it is coming out of the other universities also. There is a very rich source of debate about this. It is a great debate as to how we organise tax. This is the kind of thing that it is appropriate for a body like ours to look at, in particular because we are the stand-back for the ten, 15 to 20 years, where the stress-testing body is not working. Do we need to look here or there? If we look there, how does that interact with what is sitting over there so the whole system is working sustainably?

Even though we have a broad term of reference, the timing at which we are looking at this is interesting. We have seen huge debates in the US in the past two weeks. The Biden Administration is looking at a very distinct form of tax on income levels that were stratospheric. That is the kind of debate they are having. It is important to be aware of the debate and why it is happening and what we can learn from it. It is important that a commission of our nature looks across the different bases of taxation and how effectively they are working together.