The purpose of this amendment is self-evident. It suggests that the Minister for Finance shall publish a report into the number, status and rights and liabilities of tax exiles, a comparison to other tax-exile regimes and the annual cost to the Exchequer of such tax exiles. As the Labour Party spokesperson on finance, I have sought, on behalf of people in the PAYE sector and of small and medium businesses, to introduce into this country the notion of tax justice and tax fairness. In other words, we must all pay our taxes and we must be encouraged and facilitated in doing so. In a democracy, the greatest encouragement to people paying their fair share of taxes is to keep taxes moderate, make the system easy to understand, fair and just and ensure that the wealthy and powerful contribute their fair share as well. The problem for Ireland is that we had a regime, primarily facilitated by successive Fianna Fáil taoisigh and Ministers for Finance, that said, in the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald, "the rich are different". Everyone in a republic is a citizen but the rich are different. The first stage in dealing with this is to have information on who are the tax exiles, the number of them and what their contribution would otherwise be in income tax and PAYE.

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