Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael)

The Deputy did. He is highly perceptive. Even though these are the words in front of me. I think we have gone beyond the exploration stage with this debate and we will work to have something available in advance of the budget to inform the discussion that is happening here.

I will make a few points back. The current difficulty in the French Parliament in agreeing on the wealth is quite instructive, where they did consider it but have decided not to do it. I was not aware of the implementation of that measure in Spain but if the Deputy said it happened it has obviously happened. I am aware other jurisdictions have considered bringing in wealth taxes and have not done so.

This is because of the issues in respect both of the movement of capital and of the integration of a new wealth tax with existing taxes that are already present in the tax code.

That then leads me on to the point that we have made about broadening the tax base. Everybody is in favour of broadening the tax base generally but I find that support begins to wither when we get into individual measures for widening the tax base. In fairness to the Social Democrats and the Labour Party, both supported the revaluation of the local property tax and support the principle of the local property tax. That is a good example of broadening the tax base but we have revalued it twice since it was brought in. You can debate that maybe the revaluation could have been more ambitious. Some would argue that it was too ambitious but two revaluations have happened and there are plenty of other property taxation systems near here that are still based on the value of properties in the 1990s where no revaluations have happened. They have happened here on two separate occasions.

I agree with what Deputy O'Callaghan has said that tax base broadening at a time of crisis is the wrong time to do it but as he knows, huge expansions of the tax base in a single budget, even in normal times, produce difficulties. I do not underestimate the value, which again has been opposed in the House, of what we have done in relation to carbon taxation. That is broadening the tax base. It has gone up every year for the last number of years. As for the additional revenue that it is going to bring in for us, the base before I started increasing it is an additional €600 million per year. After a number of other moves, it will be a significant amount of additional tax revenue and we have had all the debates in relation to that.

On PRSI change, it changed in October. It is going to change again in the next few years and will keep on changing. That is another example of broadening the tax base. The fact that it is happening in an incremental way should not diminish or distract us from the fact that those moderate changes are happening every year and every year, they will mount up to a wider broadening of the tax base than we sometimes acknowledge in these debates here.

I was going to put a question to Deputy O'Callaghan but it was pre-empted by the answer he gave. When we get into these debates, I want to pose the following question. What exactly is the form of wealth that people think we are not taxing at the moment? If it is a share, it is taxed. If it is a saving, it is taxed. If it is the value of your home, it is taxed. If it is the disposal of an asset, it is taxed. If it is an investment saving, we just had a debate earlier on about a deemed disposal rule. That is a form of taxation as well. What the Deputy clarified there is that the area being considered is that we move into the taxation of wealth that is not based on the transaction. It is actually based on the level of wealth that is there. I would simply say to the Deputy that there would be policy difficulties involved in doing that. My own view is that it would just lead to the movement of capital and wealth out of what is a very open economy. What we have instead is a number of different taxes that aim to tax wealth in different ways, depending on the nature of that wealth. Most of that, with the exception of LPT, is done through transactions. I think that is a better balance for dealing with it. I know this is always going to be an issue of debate. We will try to do something in this area in advance of budget 2027 that will provide further evidence to inform the debate. I thank Deputy O'Callaghan for tabling his amendment.