Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I will not go into the example the Minister gave about corporation tax and income tax. Obviously one is on profits and the other is on income and not the turnover of the company.

I want to focus on the issue of USC. As I said, I do not support these amendments but I must take the Minister up on his commentary suggesting that he abandoned this policy. This was described by Fine Gael as the most important policy commitment it was giving the Irish electorate in the run-up to the 2016 general election. That is what Fine Gael argued. We all remember the posters of Leo Varadkar holding up signs saying "Abolish the USC". The Minister tweeted about it himself. It was the number one commitment. This was just a couple of years after the economy crashed, the IMF was here, and we learned the lessons of the Charlie McCreevy era about whittling down our tax base. That is when the Minister's party came up with this completely and utterly populist policy to get rid of €5 billion worth of tax. Not once, in any shred of paper, did he actually show how that would be accounted for.

The reason I take this up is because the Minister and his party were wrong and they were right to do a U-turn on it. They were right to abandon it. Within a year of the election the Minister abandoned that and that was the right position. As we said at the very start, despite the fact that people would love to see reductions in taxes, you cannot get rid of €5 billion of a stable tax base and think you are just going to magic it up somewhere else, or, as the Minister said, hope for growth. That is the definition of populism.

The way Fine Gael tried to get off its main commitment to the electorate in the 2016 election and erase people's memories of its members carrying these billboards about abolishing USC was by saying it would merge the USC with PRSI. Is that completely abandoned as well? The Minister got Cabinet approval and officials spent time, effort and State resources carrying out an assessment of that. That commitment was given by Leo Varadkar at the party's Ard-Fheis. Is that commitment gone or is it still under active consideration?