Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I support the amendment. I hope to hear from the Department tomorrow on the tax policy conference, the data for wealth concentration that we were told would be presented there and how that process could take us closer to considering a comprehensive wealth tax on net assets worth more than €1 million, which is a proposal that Sinn Féin outlined in a Bill that I published a number of years ago. It had certain exclusions and differs from Deputy Paul Murphy's broader suggestion.

Given the fact that some data will be presented tomorrow at the tax policy conference, having a report in six months' time is a reasonable request. It would allow us to have a debate based on available factual data. In his usual way, the Minister for Finance, Deputy Michael Noonan, made remarks on Committee Stage nearly a fortnight ago to the effect that we had somehow dropped the wealth tax. In every alternative budget that I have proposed, we have argued that the Government should introduce a net wealth tax. Not only have we done so, but we have published the legislation that would allow for it.

One area I will not go into in terms of the Government-Opposition argument every year is what we can achieve and how much money we can bring in from such a wealth tax. That is the type of data we need tomorrow to inform us about where wealth is concentrated and if we were to apply a wealth tax what suggestions or estimates the Department would have on a particular type of wealth tax. I acknowledge that wealth tax is like income tax. It all depends on what rates are involved and what exclusions apply. There are many model. One has been proposed by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions and others by other think tanks. We in Sinn Féin have put our idea into black and white in the form of proposed legislation. That was in order to spark a debate, but there is a need for it to go to another level in terms of a report by the Department, and in my view for it to do so within a six-month timeframe is a reasonable request.

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