Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

We had a budget that trumpeted the fact it is giving a so-called baby boost to new parents of children of €420. That is it. It will not go very far. Now, before midnight - in effect, from tomorrow morning - we have got a measure which will give a very substantial baby boost to the wealthiest 3% of households worth €21,450.

It is one of the great tricks of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil to try to pretend that ordinary people are affected by inheritance tax. The vast majority of people are not, and will never be in their life. There is good research done by CSO called Intergenerational Transfer of Wealth 2020. What it found is that only 30% of households, or less than one in three, have received an inheritance at some stage in their life. Two thirds of households will never get a substantial inheritance at all. Of that one third, which will tend to be the richest one third, the average inheritance that they get is €80,000, coming nowhere close to the existing threshold.

Barra Roantree looked into the figures in more detail and discovered that about 3% of households would go over the old threshold. This is a substantial tax break for some of richest people in the country. That is the reality. It is not as pure as the richest 3% in the country because it is impacted by how many children there are and so on. That is true, but basically it is a tax break for the richest people in the country at a time when approximately 4,500 children are growing up in hotels and emergency accommodation and will potentially be impacted by that for their entire lives. At a time when one in ten families is driven to use food banks to feed their kids, and one in three families says it has to cut back on meals to ensure the kids can eat properly, we have a Government that wants to ensure the children of some of the richest families in the country can get a tax break of another €21,450. It is scandalous. It has not gotten enough attention. The truth and reality of what a class-based measure this is, and the small number of people it benefits, has not been the focus of enough discussion. It is really scandalous that the Government is making this decision at a time when so many people struggle to get by.

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