Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 1 July 2015

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis

Nexus Phase

Mr. Donal McNally:

The main one that was done was to finally get rid of the tax reliefs. I mean, since 1997, some of them had been got rid of - the seaside resort scheme, the Temple Bar scheme, the Custom House docks scheme - and we would have recommended to the Minister certainly that these reliefs should go and I recall reading the 2003 budget where it said they would go in 2004 but when 2004 came, they were extended because as far as I remember, because of worries that there were schemes still incomplete. So when the new Minister came in, we put a proposal to him to try and get rid of most of these property reliefs but he asked for a special study to be done so that it could be explained to the public why this was being done, and not sudden. So that was the main one within my purview.