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

We can boil down the argument of the Minister to there being one law for the rich and one law for the rest. That is actually what SARP amounts to. People who earn more than €70,000 - quite a few of these people earn millions of euro a year - get a special and very substantial tax break on their enormous earnings which ordinary workers do not get. Such people also get tax relief on sending their kids to private schools. We are doing this because if we did not these people would not come here.

We will throw tax justice out of the window because of our fear, or blackmail, if we like, on the part of people who say they will not come to our country and bring investment along with them unless Ireland gives them a special tax deal which no other ordinary worker will get. We have to give into that and, essentially, have a different tax code and special tax deals for these super rich executives.

What about all the nurses who leave because they cannot afford to live here? Where is the special tax break for them, given that we do not have enough of them? What about all of the other allied health professionals, including doctors, who leave because their earnings are not enough to put a roof over their heads due to sky high rents? People on very high salaries are contributing to this because we build accommodation for very wealthy, rather than ordinary, people.

If we want to put this in terms of competition, we are losing out on a lot of the skills we desperately need because people feel it is not worth their while to stay here. We get high flying executives who are, let us be honest, greedy enough that, on top of their extraordinary salaries, they want additional tax relief, while a lot of our people whom we have put public money into educating and training are leaving. There are no special deals for them to keep them here. It is gross tax inequity at every level and it is literally the embodiment of there being one tax law for the super rich and one law for the rest of us.

It is obnoxious. Whatever arguments the Minister might make, I do not see how one can get around that question of inequity.

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