Professor Niamh Moloney:

I thank the Deputy for the question. I will bring in my colleague Dr. Roantree on that in a moment. The Deputy makes a very interesting point on the tax system and tax expenditures generally. Once they are in place, there is a complex political economy around them. In our chapter on tax expenditures or reliefs of various kinds, we talk about the importance of the ex-antemodelling for them, having a clear market failure, checking in on them periodically, having sunset clauses because they can become embedded and then they can become quite challenging in terms of ensuring the coherence and stability of the tax system. Part of our job with this report was to stand back and make these more challenging calls. We were an expert group so we were standing back from this and we were acutely aware of the debates and the challenging political context around it but that was our job.