Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

She is not a Cinderella, rather she comes from a background of having been a very experienced professional midwife. It she is elected to this House, it will be a first for this House to have a Member who was a professional midwife of long standing and who would have such experience of the health services.

The Minister of State said it all in one, namely, that if the first contributions from the arrangements entered into in last year's Finance Act and announced in 2009 produce a contribution, it will only come in, as it were, in October 2011. For the many people absolutely astonished by the rigour and level of the universal social charge, they basically got about three weeks' notice of it and bearing in mind that notice period included Christmas and all the bad weather at that time, it is no wonder people did not necessarily spot it in the budget coverage.

I was involved in a debate here on budget night with the former Minister, Deputy Harney, and I raised with her the issue of medical card holders having to pay the new universal social charge. If I recall correctly, she stressed that it was the policy of the Government to decouple the whole issue of taxation and medical cards. People who were setting out the policy did not have regard to the level of contribution required by people in quite poor economic circumstances and they were going to proceed with the measure, partly because of the IMF. This is one of the problems with the Irish taxation system. The former Taoiseach, Garret FitzGerald, has spoken about it on a number of occasions. The Labour Party, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil would disagree on many tax issues and on the effectiveness and fairness of taxation.

We have a hollowed out tax system in respect of which use is made of an enormous variety of loopholes and contrivances and tax advisers are used across a wide range of taxes. There are people with significant wealth, influence and power whose view of taxation in terms of a contribution is "We will not pay a cent". We do not have, as there is in other countries, an ethos whereby one makes a contribution, even if one is very wealthy and such a person does not use his or her wealth status to avoid making a contribution. It is not enough for somebody who has become very wealthy and who is very successful in business to say that his or her success in business - which is celebrated - involves him or her providing employment for people, even though that is welcome. Many multimillionaires and billionaires are to congratulated on their success and good fortune. In some cases some of them inherited their wealth. They just happened to be born in the right spot with the right name, but in many cases people are substantially self-made or have made fortunes built on more modest amounts of money that their parents may have left them.

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