Mr. Aebhric McGibney:

If I could make a general point to address the question put to us by Deputy Boyd Barrett.

One needs to have the budgetary analysis. We are good at doing distributional analysis. The ESRI has its SWITCH, simulating welfare and income tax changes, model. Every time a budget comes out, it provides an analysis by decile of how many people benefit and how many lose. There is no real framework to engage in terms of what happens if one increases or cuts taxes, however. I would argue if one increases taxes, one gets less of an activity. Sometimes things do not happen that one might want and one gets less revenue, perversely. At other times, maybe one gets more revenue. I have no framework, however, to engage on that because there is no analysis from the Department of Finance that is published that allows us to discuss this.

The biggest issue for many SMEs is not corporation tax but capital gains tax. It is about financing. It is not about them making the money but how somebody can invest and take a risk in their business. The UK has a 10% entrepreneur relief while there is much more limited scheme being developed here. We noted when capital gains tax was reduced a decade ago, we got much more revenue. We might disagree or not about policy but I do not have a framework to engage on what happens when one increases taxes on capital gains or income tax. I would welcome any kind of discussion which would allow us to engage on that and see what would happen to Exchequer returns.