Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Tax justice, as it is understood by hard-working, ordinary taxpayers, has to mean that people who have, for whatever reason, a privileged position of tax exile and then fail to pay their fair taxes have to be pursued.

4 o’clock

It is extraordinary in this day and age of so much information being available that the trawl of this category has identified, according to the Minister's own figures, 2,500 people and brought in €73 million. There is a continuing option for tax exiles to live part of the year in Ireland but otherwise be resident for tax purposes abroad. In the Government of which I was a member with the Minister, there was an agreement to a levy. I had a different view to the Minister on it, as he will probably recall. The agreement was that people would pay a levy of €200,000. That levy has produced very small potatoes. The Minister himself has acknowledged that. Given what this trawl has produced in a very short period of time, does the Minister not agree that it is wrong from any tax justice point of view that there are multi-billionaires who are not resident in this country for tax purposes but live here all the time? While a trawl of 2,500 people can yield €75 million, the Minister's levy has yielded a fraction of that. He was aware of my view on it at the time. Can the Minister learn from this experience?

See this speech in context