Bertie Ahern (Dublin Central, Fianna Fail)

I hope we can begin the social partnership talks shortly. There are some difficulties which are well known and I have addressed them already. There is an important meeting today at An Post and there are ongoing contacts at Irish Ferries. I hope that both those issues can be resolved and I ask people involved to do their utmost. It will help industrial relations overall in the country, as well as social partnership.

In successive budgets in the last few years, the Government has worked on the tax rates. We have the lowest level of personal taxation in Europe. We have also tried to deal with the biggest problem in Irish tax policy, namely, the tax wedge, so that people on average wages and above would not be drifting into the tax net. I assume Deputy Rabbitte is excluding from his figures the 657,000 people who do not pay any tax at all. He is only referring to those who pay tax. The last budget removed tens of thousands of people from the tax net. As a result of that, 657,000 of the 1.9 million income earners last year were exempt from taxes on their earnings. That represents over 34% of all income earners. This compares with 26% of all earners seven or eight years ago. Since 1997, the average tax rates as a proportion of gross income have fallen in every category.

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