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

I will probably take less than ten minutes. The Commission on Taxation and Welfare deserves great credit for the extensive work it did in producing its own report, which is a huge piece of work. Similarly, the Committee on Budgetary Oversight put in a fair bit of work and thought into producing its own report. Given the volume of recommendations involved I do not support many of the recommendations on the Commission on Taxation and Welfare's own report. Similarly, I do not agree with some of the recommendations the committee has made but it is a cross-party committee and there are lots of different points of view. Nonetheless it is very important to thrash these things out and to have suggestions made because we have to have a long-term strategic view about how we finance our country.

Although some people would accuse People Before Profit of being flathiúlach, or populist, I ague we are very prudent in that every year when we produce our budget, we have far-reaching proposals for additional expenditure in public services, pensions, health and housing.

We always balance these measures with ways to pay for them, in our case usually focusing on the concentrations of wealth in the hands of the corporate sector and the very wealthy in our society. I welcome the fact that our report and the commission focus on the need for tax equity and a taxation system that looks at capital and wealth taxes. There is a lot of controversy. In fact if we even mentioned wealth taxes to some on our committee they had near conniptions. We strongly advocate that there should be wealth taxes.

One of the things I am very keen on in our recommendations, to which the Minister alluded, is to examine tax expenditures. They are in effect a shadow budget. It is the budget that does not really get discussed. When we get to budget day, we hear about any new tax or expenditure measures. We do not hear about tax breaks of one sort or another that have rolled on for years. Sometimes they benefit very good things in society, like the tax-free allowance that ordinary workers might get. Other of these tax expenditures, though, are given to particular sectors where there needs to be ongoing scrutiny of whether these very large volumes of money are actually doing anything beneficial for our society or, as I might feel in some cases, are just lining the pockets of particular sectoral interests. That is why, for example, our committee undertook a serious examination of the film tax credit, to see if this large amount, about €100 million a year, is the best way to fund the production of film, to guarantee we have decent quality employment with training and conditions of employment for workers, and to contribute to the film culture of the country. We examined that in detail. I will not go into it now other than to say some of us feel there is a very serious question as to whether the way the tax credit is structured is actually guaranteeing the sort of quality employment and training for the people who work in that industry, and whether it is even creating an industry or just a series of pop-up shops for individual films where workers have no real recognition of their service in the industry, do not have conditions of employment and so on. We need to evaluate these things. Of course we all want to fund the film industry, but might it be better to do it through direct expenditure? It is topical when we think about RTÉ at the moment. RTÉ is a form of direct expenditure in the cultural and audiovisual sectors. The jobs are decent jobs. Some people were paid way too much at the top and there was malgovernance and all the rest of it. However, it is a particular way of funding cultural output and the audiovisual sector. If RTÉ was gone, these things would be done through tax expenditures, through measures like the film tax credit, where we would have less control over them and where employment would be characterised by high levels of insecurity. It is debatable whether it is actually building up an industry of scale over the long term.

Another example is the research and development tax credit. That is worth about €750 million to €800 million a year and is going up every year. We all want to put money into research and development, obviously; it is critically important. The question is whether the particular structure of that credit is the best way to finance and fund the sort of research and development that would actually be beneficial for our society. Is it benefiting the small and medium enterprises or just the very big and already very profitable and wealthy IT companies, the Googles and Facebooks of this world? I would argue it is the latter at the moment. More money should be going in direct expenditure to our universities and educational institutions, and to support small and medium enterprises that we think might be beneficial to our society rather than just the super-wealthy corporations. These things need to be examined. They are just two examples, we could go through the list.

An area that we probably should examine is tax breaks for forestry. We have not looked at the detail and I will not promise I know a load about it but one thing we can say is that we are not doing very well on afforestation. We are talking about climate measures. We are not doing well. We have never hit our targets. Our forestry model is over-focused on a type of forestry that is damaging to the environment, not very good for climate and not very good for local communities. Have we examined in detail the tax credits for forestry to see if they are the best way to develop a sustainable model of forestry to the benefit of our society and local communities? These things need to be seriously examined on an ongoing basis. That is one of the most important recommendations we have to look at. Tax expenditures need to be in full view when we are looking at budgets. Otherwise, about €20 billion to €30 billion, maybe more, each year of expenditure of public money in the form of tax expenditure is not being properly scrutinised and may just be handy money for certain sectors to which nobody wants to call any attention. This is important stuff to discuss and these reports are at least helping to kick-start a discussion.

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