Séamus Brennan (Dublin South, Fianna Fail)

I will certainly discuss the matter with my colleague. The Deputy will recall that the Revenue Commissioners gave a one-year derogation in 2002 in regard to exemption from this charge on the basis of a request from the Arts Council. However, there has been no progress on the matter since. The difficulty is that the people who attend these gatherings, by and large, do not pay VAT on tickets. Therefore, when the organisation involved comes to recoup VAT, it does not have VAT payments against which to offset the VAT it is required to pay. We thought we were doing the right thing in removing VAT from entrance charges. However, an unintended consequence is that the organisation does not have a claimable mechanism available to it. In a way, we set out to do good work but it had this unintended consequence which I will discuss with the Department of Finance.

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