Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

I am disappointed that the Minister's reply is so dull and unimaginative. The Minister seems very active with regard to facilitating well-off people who can afford accountants and tax lawyers to engage in tax planning and making it lucrative for them. The Minister will argue that this has its appropriate place in the system. It is sad that the Minister lacks the imagination to see what happens in terms of the majority of people who work for modest remuneration. These people are not facilitated.

I spoke about the issue with regard to health services. A family on the average industrial wage is unlikely to have a medical card, given the cutbacks in the number of medical cards by the Government over the past ten years. That number has fallen to an historic low. Many families on the average industrial wage have several hundred euro of medical bills per annum. In many cases they do not claim their tax back because, either they do not keep proper receipts or they do not know they can reclaim the tax.

What is at issue is not the fact that the Revenue Commissioners — after long debates in this House — now advertise in a variety of media that people can reclaim taxes, but that they are not active in encouraging and facilitating people to have these refunds paid. The easiest way would be to do it at source, but there has been little inventiveness on the part of the Revenue Commissioners during the Minister's reign to do this. Instead, the Minister's attention has been focused on boosting the property market, house prices and land prices to the point where that won him the election, but now we must live with the consequences of the fall. On the Minister's watch we have had the steepest decline in tax revenue, the largest increase in unemployment for a long time and serious signs of deterioration in the fortunes of the economy.

The Minister can bring in Deputy Mansergh to praise him all he likes, but self-praise is no praise.

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