Tommy Broughan (Dublin North East, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I warmly support the amendment put forward by Deputy Doherty. It is clearly a huge lacuna in budgetary strategy and policy that we do not have the serious equality proofing he talks about. For about ten years we have inserted a couple of pages in the budget documents which give a rudimentary Department of Finance type of analysis of the impact each tax change will have. I have been calling for some time for changes in this regard. Last year, I submitted an amendment to the then Finance Bill asking for a permanent commission on higher incomes and wealth to provide policy makers such as ourselves with the requisite information so that we know what we are doing when we are talking in the spring about the proposed budget for the coming year. We do not have that information.

This is the first year the CSO is conducting a survey on levels of income and wealth. It is a small survey involving approximately 5,000 households. In the context of the recent significant disclosures relating to voluntary bodies and the provision of top-up payments from non-public sources to health organisations that are primarily funded by the State, the public would like to know what people earn. They know what we earn and we must register our interests. We do not have a register of interests for the media and I believe we are remiss in that. We cannot see and do not know the particular interests of journalists and media and broadcast organisations. We do not know where they are coming from on issues. Broader society needs to know of these interests. For example, I, along with my colleagues Deputies Nulty, Murphy, Halligan and Pringle, have called for the reintroduction this month of the Christmas bonus or of some solidarity payment to the squeezed bottom of society, to the people who are suffering due to additional utility bills and so on. This payment would give them some kind of a boost. My main point and the reason I support the amendment so strongly is that we need to know the basic earnings and income of everybody. We need to know the level of wealth in society. We proposed a wealth tax for the recent budget, as did Sinn Féin. We estimated that a sum of between €300 million and €450 million could have been raised towards reducing the fiscal gap this year. There is a dearth of information in this area and we need to address that.

The acceptance of this amendment to the Finance Bill would be helpful because it would mean we would find out the real information about higher earnings and levels of wealth in society. How can we frame policy if we are framing it in darkness? We hear the views of some great industrialists, media owners and media conglomerates, people who are allegedly worth billions of euro, some of whom are not domiciled here for tax purposes. They might have a strong view on what we should do in this House in regard to fiscal policy, but we do not have any information on them. Therefore, I welcome this amendment.

Last year I proposed an amendment to the Finance Bill providing for a commission on higher incomes. As the Minister of State probably knows, the UK has a commission on high pay - a voluntary agency - which tries to collate and collect this information. I understand it is a commitment of the next Labour Party Government there to establish such an institution in the UK next September so that this critical information on budget and taxation policy will be available. Again, I warmly support Deputy Doherty.

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