Michael D Higgins (Galway West, Labour)

After I have listened to all the guff today, the various banking elite are still in place. We will return to that issue another day.

I wish to discuss capital gains tax. This Government, which created the problems the budget is addressing, has no interest in wealth. It is one of the great scandals that the media has neglected. It is as if it does not matter. Once one has it, one can hide it. Once one has made one's gains from all of the different schemes available, it does not matter. Who are the easy people to go after? The laziest way to go after the people most easily targeted is through levies. One can even achieve this in an eight month period. On the expenditure side one can get rid of the Christmas bonus.

What about all the people who shifted, when capital gains tax was initially reduced, into property? They borrowed from banks which were not real banks but were, in fact, speculators' clubs. What we had, and what the former Taoiseach describes around the world as the most successful economy in the world, had moved from being a real economy with a real banking system into a speculative economy that had a little racket going for people who were shifting their balances from one balance sheet to another at the end of the year.

I appreciate the detail which the Minister and Members of the Government go into to explain the yield and everything like that. I acknowledge the officials are preparing real figures and there are exceptions. Auditing, accountancy and public finance have been significantly degraded by the people involved in auditing accounts in our banking system. It has reached a point where they have not only dragged the economy down but have dragged fine professions down too. That is the real truth of it. The changes and the different ways we have to respond to different property values are like discussing Hamlet without the ghost. I am very interested to hear the Tánaiste being realistic in replying to what I have to say.

I ask the Tánaiste to tell me what studies have been carried out regarding wealth, the contribution of transfer patterns regarding the increase in wealth and the Commission on Taxation. Will the commission suggest how the Government can claw back money from those who abused every one of the property related, tax driven systems? It is a small group of people. How will the Government access the wealth? It has not all gone away. These are real issues. To be frank, most of the other issues are simply small potatoes which could waste our time late at night when there is no political intention or will to ever address the question of making those who are wealthy contribute in the same way as people who pay income tax or who are trying to benefit from the other side of transfers.

The phrase used in the financial press is that one is looking at the "transfer pattern". When it editorialises and questions, one finds it is talking about social welfare. There has been another major transfer pattern. There are people who reduced their tax contribution to the State in effective tax terms, in some cases to zero and other cases to nearly 5%, not to speak of the several thousand who moved themselves out of the country altogether and who were happy to have an Irish passport but were unwilling to pay their tax. These are the people who are the real scum of our society.

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