Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the announcement of a study on this issue because we need to see the figures. I am concerned that, while we are competing for businesses and trying to persuade them to relocate to Dublin in the context of financial services moving from London as a result of Brexit, we are in fact driving up some of the super-salaries available in the financial services sector in a way that is neither appropriate nor required. That does not mean that people transferring from banking feel they should be paid €10 million or €11 million a year. Those figures are not unusual in the City of London, but I do not know whether we require those kinds of salaries here. We need to see more detail about this. The Minister has commissioned a study on raising the cap on bankers' salaries. I do not understand the argument that bankers should earn so much more than they already do. Perhaps the Minister is changing the thresholds for the scheme for new entrants as a direct result of Brexit, but I have doubts as to whether it is a wise approach.

This scheme is effectively for the benefit of accounting service companies and legal companies so that they can sell themselves to HR recruiters. There is a lot of money in it for those companies in terms of services, particularly the bigger accounting firms and some of the bigger legal firms. As we all know, those companies have a history of being highly adept at creating tax break structures in Ireland that, over time, become incredibly expensive. The structures are rarely reviewed and there is often very little knowledge of what the schemes generate until years later. I welcome the review, but I hope that we will see fairly detailed, decent and serious terms of reference in it and that there will be some genuine oversight of the review, allowing us to consider the pros and cons.

I question the wisdom of how some of these structures work. I also wonder how much is paid in recruitment service fees to people making these arrangements or involved in them. In effect, what is the real return? There may be another way of approaching it. We all want to see more jobs, but from what we know about the relief, these are likely to be mostly in the International Financial Services Centre, IFSC, and other parts of Dublin. We would all agree that what we need is more jobs outside Dublin and in rural Ireland. Any relief of this type is extremely difficult, but if the Minister has some examples of significant numbers of jobs being generated in less well-off areas of our towns and cities or rural areas, I would be delighted to see the detail. However, I do not believe there are many such jobs because the bulk of them are beside the River Liffey.

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