Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I want to focus on a few points. First, I would not underestimate how outraged people are about the decision of Bank of Ireland to essentially exclude most of its customers from doing business in its branches. This sums up everything that we have done wrong and it will be a constant theme in all the points I want to make about this Bill. What people find infuriating is that this is a case of here we go again. The banks we bailed out - which brought the country to its knees and which cost us six or seven years of cruel suffering - have decided to just turn around and spit at us in the face. It is as simple as that. This bank is spitting at us in the face. People are outraged about it and I do not blame them. This is on top of the banks' refusal to give proper debt relief to those who are in mortgage arrears. People find the latter nauseating. Somebody texted me before I came to the House and suggested that Bank of Ireland customers should be outside its branches tomorrow picketing, protesting and taking their money out of their accounts. I could not agree more. What is happening is disgusting. However, those in government allowed it to happen because of their determination to nurse the banks back to health, sell them off to the private sector and allow them to be a law unto themselves in order that they can do it all over again to us. It is the small things that sometimes cause explosions and the Government may find that this will become a focus for some of the accumulated anger about the way it has let the banks off the hook.

In my initial response to the budget, I made many of the points about the generally unfair and regressive impact it will have and the laughably so-called tax give-away or "give-back". The points I made on budget day have been underlined by previous speakers. However, I will put it very simply: why does somebody earning in excess of €70,000 need €1,000 more when there are people who cannot afford to pay their rent, who are ending up sleeping in cars, tents, hostels or on the street and to whom €1,000 would make a considerable difference? Why did the Government need to give €1,000 back to people who have more than enough to pay the bills? That amount is ten times more than the Government gives to somebody on social welfare. It is cruelly unfair and it shows the callousness of the Government and its complete lack of understanding of what is happening to many thousands of families. Some 130,000 families are on housing waiting lists, thousands of people are in emergency accommodation and tens of thousands of others are in mortgage arrears and fear the loss of the roof over their heads because they cannot pay the bills. These people literally cannot keep the roof over their heads. They should have been the sole focus of the Government's budget changes in terms of giving anything back but instead it is giving multiples to the people earning in excess of €70,000 a year. That is obscene.

As I said on budget day, in some ways all of that is small beer compared to the really big-ticket item contained in this Bill. As I noted previously, it is like the magician's trick - one hand is keeping people occupied with the smaller detail while the other is doing the real business. That is how magicians work and that is how this Government works. The really big-ticket item, the real give-away, is contained in this Finance Bill in something that, relatively speaking, has received little attention, which is focused on only in the business pages, and that is the knowledge box. This is where we reveal the true colours of the Government in its determination to continue the wholesale transfer of wealth from the poor and the less well off to the super rich, to accelerate this process and to frustrate the efforts of a growing chorus of international voices demanding that something be done about this concentration of wealth in the hands of the multinational corporations. The concentration to which I refer has reached obscene levels. Just as the noose is beginning to tighten on these people, the Irish Government gives them another way out by means of a new double Irish mechanism. Let us not forget that the double Irish mechanism, which has allowed them to avoid tens upon tens of billions of euro in taxes in recent years, will be phased out up to 2020. As of the beginning of next year, they will have two ways to avoid tax, they will have the knowledge box and they will have the double Irish mechanism, just so they can work out exactly how they are going to operate this tax system to ensure they do not have to pay any extra at all.

That is part of the explanation for the mystery of the sudden appearance of €2 billion in tax revenue, the unexplained €2 billion. From where did it come? It has come from the corporations which, courtesy of the Government, have been using the double Irish to avoid tax for the past number of years. Then, because the whistle was blown by some of us who became Members of the Dáil and by a growing number of people around the world who said "This stuff has to stop", money mysteriously appeared which now can potentially be taxable income. This money will not, of course, be taxed because even though it will be included on the books, it will benefit from the knowledge box provision. Previously, this money was siphoned off. It could not be clearer what is going on. It all centres around precisely the abuse, exploitation and manipulation of things such as intellectual property and patents, which are at the centre of the knowledge box, and that is precisely what was at the centre of the double Irish, whereby increasing billions of euro were siphoned out of the system through the so-called trade charges - or royalties - on intellectual property and patents. The Minister's Department even produced a paper on this matter for the sub-committee that was examining it. Again, that was prompted by some of us who demanded that it be investigated, although the Minister refused to allow some of the main players involved to come before the Joint Committee on Finance and Public Expenditure. So terrified is he of these multinationals, he would not even allow a discussion about the suggestion that they should come before the committee to happen in public - the cameras had to be switched off.

The figures have again been buried in these papers that nobody reads. They show that the amount of income that was siphoned off under the category of trade charges increased from €5 billion in 2006 to €21 billion in 2011. Some €16 billion extra each year was siphoned off through royalties and patents under the double Irish. Now the same will be done with the knowledge box. Billions and billions of euro will be siphoned off.

Why are the people not grateful for the so-called budget giveback? Why has it not given us a bounce in the polls? Why is Labour still going to be obliterated in the coming election? The Government could have saved itself from that if it was just willing to make some of these guys in question pay some extra tax and, in so far as it got a little bounce from them this year, given it back to the people who actually needed it.

Our alternative is for an extra fiscal space of €2.2 billion. This includes adding in the €700 million that under the EU fiscal rules one is not allowed to. That €2.2 billion would cover the cost of abolishing property tax, water charges and reversing almost all of the social protection cuts imposed since this Government came into office. If, in addition to that, one made the multinationals pay the actual 12.5% on corporation tax, imposed the financial transaction tax and imposed a third level of PRSI on employers and employees who earn in excess of €100,000 a year, then the Government would get an extra €4.3 billion which would cover the cost of giving €1.5 billion extra to education, €1 billion extra to health, and abolishing the universal social charge, USC, for everyone earning less than €70,000 a year. People would be grateful for that.

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