Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am sorry to disappoint the Deputy, but I will not be spending a few days in Davos. I will be there maybe for a day and a half. I have my responsibilities here and they take precedence. I will, therefore, only be there for about a day and a half. There is a busy programme of meetings and media engagements. The advantage of Davos, quite frankly, is that there are so many politicians, world leaders and business leaders in the one place for two or three days that it would be remiss not to be there. I will be able to have maybe ten or 15 meetings in the course of the next day and a half which would otherwise take weeks to organise. This is the advantage of the meeting. I know some people believe it is part of some form of world government and we are all going off there to make decisions on behalf of the elites that secretly run the world. I guarantee that if that was the case I would go for the whole thing, but I will not because I have other things to do.

Regarding the Deputy's question, we already have wealth taxes in Ireland. Our income tax system is regarded as being one of the most progressive in the world. Less than 1% of people here pay more than 20% of income tax. We have the local property tax, and the bigger and more valuable a person's property, the more property tax the person pays. Those who have modest properties pay modest amounts and those who have no property pay nothing at all. We also have a capital acquisitions tax. This is a tax on inheritance, for example, and gifts. Oxfam points out in its report that two thirds of countries have no inheritance tax at all if moneys are passed on to people's direct descendants. In Ireland, it is 33%. We also have a capital gains tax, which is a wealth tax on the share of businesses, property and shares, for example. Our tax there, again, is 33%, while the average across the world is only 18%. This gives a good example of the kind of wealth taxes that already exist in our country.

I did have a look at the report from Oxfam. It is interesting. I will look at it properly again when I have a bit more time. I do have two questions about the report, not for the Deputy but perhaps for others. One is around the methodology. Is it net wealth or gross wealth? We all know from past experience that some people who are billionaires on paper, or appear to be billionaires, are actually fur coat and no knickers. They have a lot of money and assets on paper, but they also have a lot of debts and liabilities and their actual net wealth is negative or small. It seems this report takes their gross wealth, and this would make it somewhat inaccurate to me. The second thing is that the report specifically refers to eight Irish billionaires. When we look at the names of those eight Irish billionaires, however, and most of them would be names that are familiar to me and the Deputy and most people in this House, most of them do not live here, do not have their business based here and do not keep their assets here. Why does the Deputy think this is? It is precisely because we have a tax regime that taxes wealth much more so than other countries.

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