Dan Boyle (Cork South Central, Green Party)

I thank the Minister for providing the most comprehensive list to date of what schemes are to be reviewed and how. This process has been clouded in mystery. At his budget speech in December the Minister listed close to two dozen schemes, the advertisement for the public consultation process talked in generalities about property tax reliefs, and the terms of reference for the consultants in the review did not mention generalities of what reviews were to be examined and how. At least the Minister's reply provides us with a list of what is being examined.

Nevertheless there are many other tax reliefs that are not being examined. The Minister needs to state why this is so. In his reply to the first Priority Question he indicated that he is not taking this review as an indication of whether these tax reliefs should be abolished, merely to inform him for the next budget. Why does the Minister need a review when we have the obvious abuses that were seen in the recent "Prime Time Investigates" programme, where bar stools covered with whale's foreskin are subsidised by the Irish taxpayer? Is it not the Minister's political initiative and intuition that his existing powers to do away with these schemes or introduce subsequent legislation, such as a special Finance Bill, do not need to wait for a review?

We are still uncertain of the status of this review and if it will be published. The previous answer seems to indicate that it may not be published in advance of the Finance Bill. As part of this was predated by a public consultation process, not only should the review be published, there should be a date set when it will be published. Otherwise the Minister is engaged in a further act of deceit.

Regarding the residency rules the Minister is being economical with the truth. Not only is he exempting a wide swathe of tax relief schemes that are not examined by the current review, he is failing to treat the residency rules as the obvious tax expenditure they are. If the Minister is undertaking an all-embracing review of tax relief, he cannot ignore and avoid a public examination of the residency rules. Otherwise all we can presume on this side of the House, as many people outside the House presume, is that the Minister is engaged in an academic exercise that will result in no change and, unfortunately, we will see many other "Prime Time" programmes in advance of the next general election. Many of these tax relief schemes will still be in place and the people who benefit from them, while perhaps not in his own circle, are people who have a history of supporting his party and the way in which his party runs its operations. Until the Minister can get rid of those implications by showing firm action on tax relief, they will remain in the public realm.

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