Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

Page C.7 and the following pages give examples of changes affecting taxpayers. I notice that Nuala, Seán, Aoife and Paul, all the people who used to live at the back of the budget, have been ditched. I suppose the Minister was fed up disappointing them. They have lost their names but they live on in tabular form. The gain for a single person earning €30,000 is €6 per week or 1.2%. Who does the Minister think he is codding? The gain for a married couple with children who have one income is also exceptionally low; it is 1.2% on an income of €30,000 and even on €60,000 it is only 1.9%. That is the continued effect of individualisation. It is still biting very deeply on many families who have three children or more. In such cases, one of the spouses almost certainly cannot afford to work unless he or she is in a very high income bracket. In example 3, the gain for a married couple with two children and two incomes earning €30,000 is 6%, while it is 5.4% on an income of €60,000. Married couples with two incomes gain at something like five times the rate of a married couple with only one income——

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