Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael)

I join Deputy Burton in saying that although the procedures used are time-worn — the procedures in these Houses have probably been the same since Adam was a boy — they are inadequate for dealing with tax issues. Tax reliefs are effectively the same as public spending. We devote much time in committees and the Houses to debating Estimates and how we spend money. The same amount of money is being devoted in tax reliefs of one type or another. Recent reports showed that spending in tax reliefs dwarfed that of five Departments, yet there is a cursory examination of them.

I congratulate the Minister for Finance for having the review, but having carried it out he has failed to reform the way in which the Dáil scrutinises the decisions underpinning the issue. He is pushing ahead with new tax reliefs without taking the lessons that were clearly set out in the review, that proper evaluation of new or extended reliefs must be made before taxpayers' money is committed. While the Tánaiste may indicate that these are the practices which have been used for many years, this does not mean they are adequate. We now have the benefit of three volumes of analysis of tax reliefs. We are not using this new information to put in place proper systems and scrutiny.

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