Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister for his response. As I said, reducing the tax relief for employee contributions from €115,000 to €60,000 does not actually mean that somebody earning €60,000 does not get pension tax relief. I want to make that point because the Minister has made that claim on numerous occasions. That is not how the earnings limit for tax relief for employee contributions works. It would still allow an employee to make a contribution of €24,000 into their pension and get full tax relief on it. The average pension contribution in 2022 was €3,500.

My main question is about the distributional impact. We can see that 3% of earners who are on decent salaries availed of 30% of the tax relief. That is €378 million. Is that an issue of concern to the Minister, or is it something he thinks we do not need to deal with? One of the ways of dealing with that is through one of the proposals I put forward. There is a number of ways of dealing with it. In fairness to a previous Government, which I think may have been Fianna Fáil, it introduced standard fund thresholds back in the day. The standard fund threshold used to be €5 million at one time. It is now €2 million. Is that issue something the Minister thinks needs to be dealt with? I definitely think it does. As I said, it is crucial that we continue the policy that underpins pension tax relief, but we do need to look at its distributional impact.