Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

The Minister's answer makes the perfect case for commissioning a report. It contains a lot of information that has not been put into the public domain before. I am aware of the fact that, in response to discussions on this issue, the Minister introduced a levy. The intentions of Deputy Richard Boyd Barrett are good, but I can explain something to him. We could not possibly have brought this forward at a time when the banks and the construction industry were incurring mega losses in the process of collapsing and possibly about to disappear down the Swanee. It is only possible to do so as the banks return to profitability. I introduced this argument in 2006 when, on foot of requests for reports from the Revenue Commissioners to be laid before the Dáil, I asked how many people in the tax system with an annual income in excess of €1 million paid no income tax. The answer which is in the report to be found in the Oireachtas Library was that there were quite a lot of such individuals. It gave rise to the introduction of a minimum effective tax rate, based on models in the United States. I do not suggest this concept is perfect, but it is a device to get people to bring forward, on a current cash basis, payments of tax which, if they were allowed to accumulate, would lead to no tax being paid and no cash flow for the State.

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