Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I support Deputy Pearse Doherty's sensible amendment. He has increased the period of consideration from three months to one year. I would not have gone as far as him because it would be useful to have the information in advance of the next budget to allow the Dáil to decide whether the tax expenditures stack up.

The Minister is a proponent of evidence-based policy-making. As a leading Opposition Member he spent many years interrogating government policy in finance and other portfolios. The only comparative analysis on this issue that I could find is a study of OECD budgetary processes, which indicates that Ireland's budgetary process is the second worst after South Africa's. Two scores caught my eye in particular. On the amount of time Parliament is given to interrogate a budget in advance of its introduction, we scored zero out of ten, and on the amount of information given to Parliament to interrogate a budget, we also scored zero out of ten. I acknowledge, however, that the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform is making a genuine effort to provide additional information and transparency on expenditure and the process is slowly beginning to improve. When Deputy Pearse Doherty proposed his earlier amendment on Committee Stage, the Minister, Deputy Michael Noonan, rightly pointed out that our job as parliamentarians is to hold him to account and interrogate legislation on behalf of the people. He went on to say that we get the analysis three months after the budget. However, that is the heart of the problem. We are only provided with some analysis - not enough - three months after the budget has been introduced. The study on budgetary processes included a bar graph which set out when parliaments got information on budgets. Generally, this varied between one month and six months before the budget. In only one country, Ireland, the Parliament got the information subsequent to the budget. We are a complete outlier in this regard.

Deputy Mary Lou MacDonald and I asked for a regulatory impact analysis to be carried out prior to the introduction of the budget, including equality-proofing, gender impact analysis and poverty impact assessments. These are the types of analysis carried out in other developed democracies. The Minister agreed to investigate the Scottish model for equality budgeting, which is held up as good practice by boffins in this area. As a first step, I ask him to accept this amendment. It is a small and reasonable request that the Dáil should at least consider the impact of changes to tax law.

In his amendment Deputy Pearse Doherty has drawn attention to job creation costs for the State, which are very important. He includes in his amendment the words "and other such impacts", which I believe is equally important. We need to look at the poverty impacts of these tax breaks or changes. We also need to look at an analysis of their gender impact and to consider the revenue and cost implications for the State.

There are two other issues I would like the Minister to think about. Other Parliaments have their own budgetary office, staffed by analysts and this practice seems quite successful. Obviously, the Cabinet gets its advice and analysis from the Civil Service and the Minister gets his from his officials. Many other parliaments have a budgetary office and I suggest this as a possibility. I do not say this lightly. I appreciate hiring more people for our Parliament in the current environment is very difficult. However, it is certainly something that should be considered.

Second, something I imagine has caused the Minister no lack of frustration over his career in politics is the part of the Constitution which says that nobody except the Minister can table an amendment that produces a charge on the State or has a tax implication for a citizen. The amendment I put forward concerned maternity leave. In good faith I tried to table something that would achieve what the Minister stated he wanted to achieve, but which did not have negative effects. However, my amendment was ruled out of order for some reason such as it fell between two Departments. The Government has plans for various referendums, but it seems that one of the things that hampers this House doing its job is the clause that means the majority of proposals we would like to make cannot be made, although I know there are ways of playing games with them, such that we can include something that would counter the cost.

It would be great if the Minister could accept the Deputy Pearse Doherty's amendment, or something very like it. I would love the Minister to consider changing the Constitution in order that we could do what we are meant to do - interrogate the legislation and propose sensible amendments.

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