Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)
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Just in case. I refer to the distinction between current and capital expenditure. It often seems like a sensible distinction to make but, when examined closely, is often a false distinction.

For example, we have significant skills and qualified professional shortages in a whole range of areas - the health service, construction and engineering and many other areas. It seems to me that the way to address that would be to create additional places in colleges and universities, which would be current expenditure, by creating additional places and removing things like fees and other obstacles to people accessing higher and postgraduate education. That would be current expenditure, but it would be an investment in the future which would save us money down the line. I would make a similar point about our proposal that we should have things like free public transport. It would be additional current expenditure, but in the future it would save us on things like fines for carbon emissions and so on. Therefore, I question the merits of that distinction in many areas. I could quote others but I do not have time.

Lastly, I pushed at this committee, as did other members, for the examination of tax expenditures, which the committee has agreed to examine. There is a huge shadow budget that we have every year that is not scrutinised in the same way as the direct expenditure budget. We are proposing that those tax expenditures should be examined in the same sort of way during the budget as direct expenditures. I would like the Minister to comment on that, because in my opinion many of those tax expenditures are essentially tax loopholes which allow big corporations to evade tax. To give the Minister one example, and perhaps he might comment on it, in the latest available figures for revenue, the cost of intra-group transactions, a tax relief, in 2019 was to the tune of €16 billion in lost revenue. I presume that is accruing to some of the big multinational corporations that use transfer pricing to avoid their tax obligations. That is €16 billion in just one category of tax relief. Should these things frankly not be closed down, or at the very least examined in a detailed way as part of the budgetary process?