Dr. Seán Healy:

I can explain it very easily; I have had this discussion with Seamus Coffey on many an occasion, even in the presence of the Minister for Finance. There are some quite serious differences when the calculations are done. When one tax is compared with the same tax elsewhere in isolation, then one can be completely different from the other. It is necessary to look at the overall tax take. The OECD has a methodology for doing this. EUROSTAT has a slightly different version of that. They will both show comparisons for all the European countries, which show that Ireland's total tax take is down in the bottom four or five countries out of the EU 28.

When that is broken down, the biggest difference is in employers' PRSI, which in a country like France is four times what it is in Ireland as a percentage. We are making choices. We argue for impact assessment in advance of the budget and not after it - the kind of stuff I was talking about earlier. We should be mature enough as a nation to ask ourselves about the choices we are making on taxation. We need to consider the whole ball of wax, the complete tax take, including local charges, VAT, water charges, income tax, all the pieces of PRSI and so on. We need to split it out, and see what the comparisons are and what they tell us the choices we are making. We then need to be mature enough as a Government to say, "We are making this choice for that reason." Let the evidence speak.