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

I thank all of our contributors and the commission for what is a pretty enormous piece of work. I cannot say I have read every word of it. I am still working my way through it. The plain English version of the executive summary was helpful. There is so much in it. With regard to the principles outlined by the commission and echoed by all of our contributors here, there is a fair degree of agreement about where we need to go. Things need to be sustainable and equitable. I will refer to some of the specific measures that are being talked about. It is great that there is agreement on one. I have been calling for some time for scrutiny of the shadow budget, which Deputy Mairéad Farrell has mentioned. I know that many of the witnesses have been saying the same thing for quite some time. It is a vast area of expenditure of public money that is not properly scrutinised. As Dr. Healy has said, it needs to be examined as part of the budget every year. We need to be aware that decisions are being made that involve billions and we need accurate and easily understood information about these expenditures. I first stumbled across this stuff in a little table from Revenue that consisted of two or three pages of tiny writing but which had enormous figures attached to it. There is not even any consistency between Revenue, the Department of Finance and the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform so, in actual fact, there are three sets of figures as to these expenditures. Something at which I am amazed in the latest set is the figure for intragroup transactions.

That is €35 billion for one tax expenditure, which had jumped about €7 billion from the previous year. That is to do with the big multinationals shifting around profits through prices for royalties and paying themselves for the use of intellectual property. That is my take on it. That is just one tax expenditure. Deciding what is and is not in the base and all these things needs a consistent approach. They need to be examined thoroughly and I welcome the fact that everybody here is saying that.

I will get to the slightly more controversial things. I lean more towards what Social Justice Ireland says on specific measures. They echo many measures we argue for in terms of a financial transaction tax, looking more closely at corporate tax and at people who own multiple properties, second homes tax, taxes on underdeveloped land and empty houses and so on. On the site value tax, I am not entirely sure. I get a bit confused about property taxes, site value taxes, zoned land taxes and how best to approach that. As a broad principle, people should not be rewarded for sitting on land, doing nothing with it and making fortunes by flipping it, hoarding it or speculating on it. We have to do something about that. It is a scandal that it is facilitated.

Would the witnesses like to comment on the notion that the simplest solution is to nationalise much of that land? In Finland, where they have made great strides in dealing with homelessness in recent years, it was interesting to see about 70% of the land in Helsinki is controlled by the state. An even better way than taxing it is for the state to control most of the land and, if you want to use it, you have to have a good reason to use it and put forward the case for using it for development of this, that or the other. Maybe there is more complexity in trying to find the right taxation regime than in nationalising much of the development land and having a planned, rational and democratic approach to developing land for housing, infrastructure, services and so on. That is a question for all the witnesses.

On the slightly more controversial issues, the ESRI and the report say the property tax as it stands should be retained. I am for taxes on multiple properties but I have a problem with the tax on the family home. The Department of Finance in 2017 estimated the distribution of that enormous amount of wealth at up to €1 trillion, as Dr. McDonnell said, which is staggering. We do not do regular studies of the distribution of that wealth. I do not know if there have been any recent ones. We are operating in the dark if we do not have that. If I am right, in 2017, the Department of Finance did one such study and estimated the top 10% had 53% of that wealth, while the bottom 50% had 1.4% of the wealth. I am keen to tax very heavily the 10% but am also keen not to have a go at the 50%, some of whom own properties, but who only have 1.4% of the wealth. That is the difficulty with the property tax. When it is directed at the principal private residence, it is often directed at people who have little or nothing. Given that 70% of people in the country own their homes, that is what it is doing. Will the witnesses comment on that problematic issue?

It is interesting that the commission says we should leave our corporate tax strategy as it is. There is a glaring contradiction. There is a suggestion we should reduce the threshold of capital acquisitions, which we have done. It used to be €500,000 and is now down to €320,000 or whatever the figure is. By not moving it upwards, we are in effect reducing that threshold.