Dr. Robert Kelly:

The individual decisions on taxation and what needs to be done is for Government to make. However, the point the Deputy is making is that if we remove a certain sector from the tax base on a consumption tax like that, we are further reducing the tax base. We have a piece in the quarterly bulletin, the last signed article we had in the summer, where we looked at the public finances. It shows that even before we do some of this, although we have a VAT rate that looks quite high, due to the various implementations and carve-outs at a European level the coverage is lower than the rate would be. We would be further reducing our corporation tax base. It comes back to the point about the 5% rule. If we do this, it is necessarily netted off against spending when we take it out of the net.