Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

My concern is that like many things in this country, the State is more generous to the well-off than the poor. It is a mirror trick because people think they are getting cash back. It is a salesperson's trick. Life is full of them but one does not normally expect the State to get into salesperson's tricks. The proposal at one stage was that everyone would get tax relief at 33%. While that would mean a lot more money for those at the high end, it was at least the same in terms of percentage. In this case, if one hits the 40% at all, one is getting robbed, to put it bluntly. I could not understand that about the trick.

Dr. Roantree referred to the exempt-exempt-taxed regime. Let us consider two people, one of whom is contributing to a private pension fund.

He or she is exempt when putting it in. The other one is taxable but gets a bit of a kickback. It is not as good as the tax relief if someone is on 40% and is about the same on 20%. There is nobody on 0% because of the reason I gave. I presume that both are equal and that the income earned from the scheme is subject to tax relief, although we saw during the crisis what happened with that. One pays tax at the marginal rate of tax and presumably this income is as taxable as any other income.