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

Deputy Farrell has made most of the points and it is her and Deputy Doherty's amendment. My wider view on banks is that, after we bailed them out, we should have kept them in public ownership, taken them over and developed a not-for-profit banking system. These private banks we bailed out are carrying losses forward and dramatically reducing their tax liabilities year on year. Then their customers pay the highest interest rates anywhere in Europe and they are ruthless when it comes to dealing with their customers. For example, they unload their portfolios of loans to vulture funds. How they get tax breaks is obnoxious to me, but that is an aside.

The Committee on Budgetary Oversight has agreed, whatever about our views on particular tax reliefs and allowances, that they should be seriously scrutinised regularly to assess whether those reliefs, allowances and tax credits are justifiable. While the Minister will clearly not undertake to compile this report, or many of the reports we are looking for, there is agreement in the committee that we need to look at these things because they go under the radar and have gone under the radar for long periods of time. Whereas we rightly have a lot of scrutiny of direct expenditure measures during the budget, we have far less scrutiny of tax reliefs, allowances, deductions and so on and whether they are justified. The issues at stake in these myriad reliefs are as big as the direct expenditure issues.

A wide body of opinion is expressing the same view, namely that we need to study these things in a serious way and on an ongoing basis to assess if these measures are delivering on the objectives for which such reliefs, allowances and deductions were originally established. In this case, are they delivering a good banking sector for us? That is a good question, is it not? A lot of people might seriously ask that question. I was asking about films earlier on but there are many reliefs and we need seriously to scrutinise them. I ask the Minister to consider that and he knows the committee is asking for that. Some of this work has been done in tax strategy papers, but on an ongoing and systematic basis we need to study, scrutinise and assess these tax reliefs, which effectively are a shadow budget that does not get the same level of scrutiny as the conventional budget we hear about on budget day.

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