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

I am something of a political nerd when it comes to finance Bills. I am fascinated by the way they provide a mechanism to transfer the wealth generated by society and by working people into the hands of the very wealthy in an opaque manner, year after year. For the most part, working people do not know the details of how they are being robbed of the wealth they collectively produce. I play a game with the finance Bill every year in which I try to find the tax relief that will benefit the rich. I then try to find the sneaky tax that will punish the poor. It is a game I strongly recommend people who care about injustice in society learn to play. They would learn a lot by examining these opaque mechanisms through which the very rich and big business rob the poor. They do so by not paying a fair contribution in tax on the enormous wealth they acquire through profits generated by working people, working people who have to pay their taxes because they are taken directly out of their pay packets every week. Many of the very wealthiest people, who own some of the biggest and wealthiest companies, effectively write their own tax bills. Year after year, finance Bills provide a mechanism for the wealthy to avoid paying tax, either through omission, by failing to discontinue tax reliefs given in previous years, or through proactive moves.

I want to talk about specific instances of that phenomenon. I should mention some of the highlights, most of which were mentioned in the main budget discussions. If for no other reason, we will be opposing the Finance Bill 2020 because of the carbon tax. It is the latest in a long line of regressive taxes which punish ordinary people, often on the grounds of protecting the environment as in the case of bin charges and the attempt to bring in water charges. In fact they are just ways of regressively taxing working people for things that are not their fault but the fault of other people. That is what the carbon tax does. The net effect of the €7.50 increase in carbon tax this year will cost ordinary people about €60 or €70 a year. Increasing carbon tax by €60 or €70 every year up to the targets proposed will slowly chip away at the income of ordinarily people, disproportionately hitting the poorest as a substitute for taxing the polluting corporations that do the real damage. We do not want to tax them. In fact we go out of our way to make sure they do not pay taxes by providing them with a multiplicity of tax breaks.

Because we will not do that, we tax people who live in council houses they are not even allowed to retrofit. Such people cannot do anything to reduce their energy bills until the local councils decide to retrofit their homes, but they are going to be punished with additional energy costs to keep their houses warm. People are going to be punished for the fact that they cannot afford electric cars. A wealthy person can afford a brand new electric car, but someone who does not have the money for that will be punished for it year after year on a progressive basis. That is one reason we will be opposing the Bill.

The employment wage subsidy scheme is another major issue. We welcomed and supported the measures to support people's incomes and maintain their relationships with their employers. There is an interesting contrast with the case of Debenhams workers. We are looking for €10 million for them to get their two plus two. We cannot get it because it is too much to ask, it will set desperate precedents etc. However, Boston Scientific, a major multinational company that produces medical equipment, was fully operational during the pandemic but it benefited from the temporary Covid-19 wage subsidy scheme. This company is hugely profitable but fiddled around with its manufacturing process to meet the required 25% reduction in turnover and benefited from the scheme as a result. A range of quite profitable companies are benefiting. I support any Government measure to keep people employed and maintain their relationship with their employers, but there should be oversight over companies' cash reserves, their ability to contribute and any top-ups they are making. Are the CEOs and executives of these companies paying themselves massive salaries? Are they operating offshore in order to avoid tax? Those oversights were not imposed on many very profitable and wealthy companies that benefited from the subsidy schemes.

Returning to my favourite game, I notice a couple of tax benefits for the rich. One was mentioned earlier. Section 48 provides a partial refund of stamp duty where land is developed for residential purposes. This extends from 24 months to 30 months the period in which construction must be completed for a developer to benefit. In layperson's terms that is a tax benefit for land hoarders and speculators, people who are already profiting very handsomely from our inflated housing market. That market benefits developers while the lack of public and affordable housing has the wider social effect of a housing crisis.

I do not really understand this section 23, which provides for capital gains tax relief for individuals who dispose of assets of a qualifying business or shares in a qualifying company if they have owned them for three years in the five-year period before their disposal. I will not go into all the detail. We can do that on Committee Stage. However, that seems like another tax giveaway for the haves instead of the have-nots.

That can be added to the litany of tax reliefs and allowances that allow very big corporations, some of the wealthiest corporations in the country which have seen their profits double in the past ten years from approximately €80 billion gross profit in 2008 to approximately €180 billion gross profits before tax deductions in 2020, to pay tax on only approximately €90 billion of those profits. They avail of tax loopholes for the other €90 billion. The loopholes include things such as the research and development tax grant, intra-group transactions and tax relief around amalgamations, which is another big one. Many of them are detailed in a very interesting list I have before me which is produced by Revenue. I wave it about every year. It lists all of these tax reliefs which amount to approximately €20 billion or €30 billion per year.

A tax relief I have highlighted for the past few years is that relating to intra-group transactions. That is how big multinational corporations essentially write down their tax bill by stating they owe money to another subsidiary of their company money and therefore do not have to pay tax on those profits. Interestingly, that heading on this little Revenue list has changed and disappeared. I suspect that is because I keep highlighting it. It has gone from the list and been merged into a few other headings. It is worth pointing out that Pfizer has 27 subsidiaries in Ireland, Johnson & Johnson has 23, Merck has 23, Abbott Laboratories has 13, Thermo Fisher Scientific has eight, Gilead Sciences has seven, Boston Scientific has six and Eli Lilly has six. There are loads of companies that have a network of subsidiaries through which they organise their tax affairs basically by paying each other loans and money and royalties and all the rest so that they end up paying little or no tax. I do not have time to go into all of the details but I think it is a scandal. Every single year at budget time the House should be examining every single one of these tax reliefs, looking at who benefits from them and assessing what benefit, if any, is actually going to society. I think we would find they are of very little benefit to society.

I will conclude on section 481 tax relief. I pay tribute to the Minister, Deputy Donohoe, because he has genuinely listened on this issue and made genuine changes relating to the section 481 tax relief from which film production companies benefit to the tune of approximately €80 million each year, in addition to the approximately €20 million they get from Screen Ireland. That adds up to €100 million per year, or €1 billion over the past ten years, that has gone to the film industry, but how many people have actual permanent jobs of any description in the film industry? There may be 50 such jobs if we are lucky. At one stage, the people who get all this money appeared before an Oireachtas committee and stated there were 17,000 jobs. Members stated that was not true and that there were nothing like 17,000 jobs. The Department of Finance looked into it and discovered there were approximately 2,000 jobs, all of which were Strumpet City style jobs. People would go down when the film was set up and ask if there was any chance of a job but be told that film company did not really like them and would not give them a job. That is how the film industry in this country works. Nobody working in the industry has a pension or any basic entitlements in terms of continuity of service. One can work in the Irish film industry and be blacklisted tomorrow, as some people have been because they actually highlight these matters. Those people get absolutely nothing, but the State hands out very large sums of money totalling approximately €100 million each year.

Deputies should not get me wrong. I want money to be put into the Irish film industry. In fact, I would not like a cent less to go into it. However, I believe the funding needs to be tied to ensuring there is proper employment, decent contracts, pensions and so on for those who work in the industry and a recognition of their service and the years they have worked in the industry, something that does not currently happen. In that regard, I point out to the Minister that according to the Revenue figures, several of the big production companies get €10 million to €30 million on a production. It is probably a breach of the EU rules in terms of reporting state aid not to be sure whether they were given €10 million or €30 million of public money. That is unacceptable for a start, but those same companies have gone to the Workplace Relations Commission, WRC, in recent weeks and stated that they have no employees, that it is a designated activity company, DAC, that has the employees rather than the company that receives the money from the State. Despite the reforms the Minister brought in, the companies are still playing the same game of trying to hide behind the DAC and not take legal responsibility for their employees. That must stop. I appeal to the Minister to look further into how these companies are saying one thing on a declaration they are supposed to sign to get the relief and saying another thing when they go before the WRC.

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