Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 18 December 2014

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis

Context Phase

Photo of Ciarán LynchCiarán Lynch (Cork South Central, Labour)
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That brings me on to my final question, and regardless of whether the banking crisis ever happened. When the Irish economy came to that sudden stop, there was a deficit of about €30 billion in tax revenue coming in to meet the daily outgoings of running the country on a day-to-day basis which meant the Irish nation was short €30 billion to manage its house, and that was because of a tax shortfall and not because of banking debts or anything else, which is what the focus of the inquiry is about. Coming back to the change between the 1990s and the 2000s, was there an observational change in taxation in the area of property and in development, that there were particular taxation policies that changed between the 1990s and the 2000s that actually had a specific impact in the property and development sector that were creating the sort of overheating in the economy that you are talking about?