Ray Butler (Meath West, Fine Gael)
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That is fine. When I was self-employed, if my accountant had told me I had to pay another 1.5% onto the 4.5%, and given I would be paying my income tax or, if I was not making a profit, I would be paying tax on my drawings, then surely to God I would have swapped a little of this to put onto a stamp in order to protect my home and my wife and children. Let common sense prevail. When the Mangan report was published, many groups came out and categorically said small businesses could not do this. We all know small businesses are suffering but nobody spoke to the Minister or the Department about what way it was going to be implemented. If that was the case, the Minister would have said, as she said to me immediately afterwards when I brought it up under Topical Issues, that she never had any intention of putting 1.5% straight away onto the 4%, and that she was going to introduce this in stages.

We could be further down the road in this regard. The big question is whether we make it voluntary or mandatory. We have seen things done on a voluntary basis in this country before and I keep repeating that they have not worked. I believe the way forward is to do this on a mandatory basis and to bring it in at 0.25%. As Mr. Dolan and the others are saying, let us move on and see if it works. Then, if the economy is going better two or three years down the road, we can then bring in another 0.25%, but at least we will have started to recognise self-employed people for the first time in the history of the State through social protection. This would mean they do not have to beg for their payments or wait to see if the community welfare officer is up to speed on self-employed people and social protection, because if the community welfare officer is not up to speed on this, there is no money to feed the person's family or pay the mortgage.