Peter Mathews (Dublin South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on the Financial (Local Property Tax) (Amendment) Bill 2013. I have listened to the contributions of Deputies on all sides to a debate which has travelled into many areas. It began with a focus on first principles, namely, why we are dealing with legislation relating to a local property tax by means of which we are aiming to raise approximately €500 million in a full year in order to fill a hole in the collapsed revenues of the State and to the creation of what will hopefully be a fair and balanced framework that will be used to charge people for the services they use in their areas, be they urban or rural, in the future. However, the country is in a very damaged state. I will not get into the blame game here because I do not carry political baggage. I am lucky in that regard. I am not in the business of throwing accusations backwards and forwards or of laying blame.

In this period of readjustment, we must correct the country's overall finances by reducing the deficit from €15 billion to €12 billion, of which €8 billion or €9 billion is interest on borrowings to date. In doing so we must realise that huge pain has already been experienced and that families are hurting. Previous speakers referred to suicide. Even young children are dying as a result of suicide, not because of things which appear on Facebook or whatever but because in their homes there has been an accumulation of four to five years' worth of stress and worry. Families are falling apart, they are unable to pay their bills, the banks are holding a sword of Damocles over their heads in the context of threatening to repossess their homes and their gas and electricity supplies are being turned off. If one said "Boo" to a teenager in the current climate, the likelihood is that, because his or her confidence is so damaged, he or she could do something sudden and destructive. We do not need to bring in psychiatrists or psychologists to investigate the causes to which I refer. If we are honest, the evidence is already there.

We must make a massive readjustment in order to bring back into being the revenues that must be justly and fairly earned in order to pay for public services. We must then stabilise those revenues and replenish them year by year. In addition, we must become more efficient in terms of the delivery of services by cutting costs in a reasonable way and by striking a balance.

I always like to make a recommendation, and I recommend Daniel Kahneman's book Thinking, Fast and Slow. We have got into the habit of thinking too fast in modern times, particularly in recent times, and we fall prey to illusions and impressions. We make our budgets and cut our cloth based on knee-jerk reactions. There is a lack of depth and rational thinking and no sense of scoping out what is sustainable, what makes sense and what has an engineering structure to it. We sometimes opt for lightweight architecture or impressions and packaging.

We should go back to first principles. We need to raise €0.5 billion or €1.5 billion to contribute to correcting the budget deficit of €3.5 billion this year. We know that revenues for the State will come from incomes, whether they be corporate or personal incomes. We must then ask, in this period of readjustment or national recovery, what is fair and to whom we should look. Do we look to the large numbers of people who are weighed down, unfit, depleted and too exhausted to carry on their work to take more exhaustion, or do we look to the stronger people who are temporarily toned and strong and can carry the extra load? To me, it makes sense to look to them, but we must explain to them the reason we are doing it. We should tell them we are doing it for three years, and that we would like them to step up to the mark with their stronger resources.

To give an example of why they are stronger, the exports surge of the past four or five years has led to revenues for the companies engaging in that exporting. Costs must be subtracted from revenues, but costs during the past four or five years have fallen as a result of efficiencies. There has been a surge in the profits or the surplus income of these companies. I do not care whether they come from home or abroad, but it would be reasonable for them to bear that readjustment for the national economy. We could ask those stronger people to take the honour of bearing a bit of extra load - say, a 2.5% levy on corporate profits. The Minister is familiar with this, and he is being patient as I speak, but 2.5% on corporate profits per year would yield approximately €650 million; the Department has told us that. If the high-income earners - I am not talking about those earning €100,000 but those earning €120,000 and over - were to take a levy of 4% not on their marginal incomes but on their full incomes, that would yield another €0.5 billion. If we threw into the mix a betting tax on everything that is gambled, whether it is online, on racecourses, in international poker clubs or whatever-----

See this speech in context