Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

I move amendment No. 1:

In page 4, before section 1, to insert the following new section:

"1.—(1) This Act shall expire on the day that is 2 years from the date of its passing unless renewed by resolution of both Houses of the Oireachtas.

(2) Any such renewal shall be expressed to be for a period not exceeding 2 years.".

This amendment provides for a sunset clause for the levy which would be for two years' duration. If the Government of the day wished to renew it, it would have to be brought before both Houses of the Oireachtas.

As the Labour Party pointed out on Second Stage, the Bill is full of anomalies which the Minister for Finance, in his concluding speech last night, did not address. The Bill will apply to all Civil Service incomes, no matter how much or how little a civil servant earns. Civil servants on low incomes or who work part-time will be subject to the full rigour of the levy in the same way as the mandarins at the top, some of whom earn well in excess of €200,000 a year. Low-paid civil servants being subject to the levy is a critical issue of fairness.

Civil and public servants are realists. They understand the Government has landed the country into an appalling economic mess in which much of the prosperity for which we all worked hard to produce has been squandered. It has been frittered away by the Government in its handling of the banking crisis and, particularly, the Minister for Finance through his failure to address the corporate failures, scandals and abuses that occurred in Anglo Irish Bank.

At the end of September 2008, the Minister for Finance and the Taoiseach decided the taxpayer should rescue the bank when, in fact, they were aware of the goings-on in it from the day they took up their respective offices. I have no doubt that the former Taoiseach, Deputy Bertie Ahern, was more than fully aware of the goings-on in the bank, seeing that he was particularly wont to hang around with golden and privileged circles——

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