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

We do not have time to go into the issue of allowances in two minutes, but I want to make one point. The Comptroller and Auditor General identified €231 billion in allowances and losses brought forward. The figure is so big it is mind-boggling. The gross trading profits of the corporate sector were €80 billion higher than its taxable income in 2016. That is the scale of these loopholes. As against that figure, the allowances at which the Minister is looking or which Revenue is going to go after, most of which are given to working people who are relatively low-paid and precariously employed, amount to €85 million. Hundreds of thousands of workers get little tiny loopholes in the form of real, justifiable allowances based on the cost of working and the corporations get €231 billion. That is just not fair. It is not even fair to look at the workers' allowances, which they really need. They are a couple of hundred quid. They are contributions towards the cost of getting to work, uniforms, tools, or whatever else it might be while an enormous amount is being written off in terms of taxable income for those at the top. That needs to be looked at.

I am going to keep banging on about it until we force the details of these allowances, reliefs and loopholes into the public view so that they can be scrutinised and so that they have to be justified. Frankly, that has not happened. It is beginning to happen a bit in respect of some of them, but we have a hell of a long way to go. We should not even be looking at low-paid workers. This asks for a report. For the benefit of Deputy Burton, we were talking about individual incomes, not combined incomes. That is the first point.

Second, the examples the Minister gave leave out the middle cohort. Workers on €35,000, €40,000, €45,000, €50,000, €60,000 and so on are paying quite a lot of tax when - and this is the point I made at the very outset - it is added to all the other forms of indirect tax, such as property taxes, bin charges, and water charges. Luckily we have defeated the latter for now. There are many other areas in which people are paying stealth taxes such as the public service obligation levy on utility bills and so on. It all adds up to an additional tax burden on working people that is disproportionate when compared with how these charges impact on people at the top. The Minister's point about people paying taxes at a lower level might be justified if there were not all of these extraneous costs, which are in effect taxes, imposed on people for just about everything they do. That is the point. It is not just me saying that. That is the reason people were out on the streets. It was not because populists stirred them up but because people are furious about this stuff.

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