Gerald Nash (Louth, Labour) | Oireachtas source

The view was that things were going to balance out and be okay. I believe the thinking might be a little different now, however, and there might be more anxiety and nervousness.

On corporation tax, Dr. McDonnell asked whether we were the boy who cried wolf. We have been hearing for a long time about our reliance on excess corporation tax receipts to fund day-to-day expenditure and so on. There are obvious risks in this regard that we need to be alive too. It is not today or yesterday that I have started talking about this; I have been talking about it for a long time. In 2021, the Department of Finance warned us that, even in the context of BEPS pillar 1, we were likely to be down by about €2 billion per year. Sometimes it is hard to take Department of Finance outlooks and Estimates seriously but I appreciate that there have been many moving parts over recent years and that nobody could really predict what would happen. If we are to accept, as I do, that there is genuine vulnerability because of the concentration effect, we are going to rely on a handful of US FDI firms not only for our corporation tax, but also for income tax because of the nature and quality of the jobs. It is a genuine vulnerability.

Consider the circumstances if we are to agree that our tax base more generally is vulnerable. Dr. McDonnell has been a member of the Commission on Taxation and Welfare and will note that there has been a marked reluctance on the part of this Administration and its predecessor to dust things down, ask what can be done to rebalance things, and say we should increase current expenditure, target what is needed in society and help sections of the economy that require help, be it on the current side or capital side. There has also been a marked reluctance to raise revenue from alternative sources that would not have an impact on innovation or productivity and that would potentially give PAYE workers a break of some form in the future, even though Irish income tax has probably always been about where we need it to be. Has Dr. McDonnell a view on the top one or two places where we can identify potential revenue-raising measures that would not be harmful to the economy?