Brendan Ryan (Labour)

We are talking about serious offences here. In the same period, between 2,000 and 3,000 people have been convicted of welfare offences. What I would like to highlight is that there are very exacting evidential standards to be met in order to satisfy the criteria for a successful prosecution. Why is that not the case when 300 or 400 people per year are prosecuted successfully for welfare abuse?

A selective approach must be adopted to avoid Revenue resources being tied up in what is an extremely labour-intensive process. Why is that not the case? The reason is that the average citizen who is charged with Revenue offences — not all, but most of them — does not have access to high quality accountants, high quality lawyers and all the other high quality advice about their rights. They are, therefore, easy targets to prosecute. I am not saying the Department does anything illegal but the average citizen does not know what he or she does not have to say or what he or she can avoid doing. They do not know any of that and, therefore, it is comparatively easy to prosecute.

Effectively, what the Revenue is saying is that it cannot prosecute them because the difficulty of proving it is so great. The difficulty of proving it is that these people, as they are entitled under the Constitution and under our law, use all the devices every citizen has to ensure they are dealt with fairly. However, what it looks like to society, correctly in my view, is that it is essentially a system of one law for the rich and one law for the poor.

People mentioned imprisonment. The word "imprisonment" is not mentioned in our motion because I am not greatly enthusiastic about locking people up. For instance, I am not a great enthusiast for locking old people up, whatever their offences might have been during their political careers, but I am an enthusiast for the process of trial and conviction. As I have said before in the House, I would not have liked to see General Pinochet locked up; putting an 80 year old man in jail does not appeal to me. However, the fact of prosecution is an enormously significant matter in the context of the point made by Senator Dardis regarding the view rich people have of themselves and the view of rich people that other people have.

I agree with Senator Dardis that we, in this country, are moving on. However, if we are to move on, the citizens must believe that everybody is equal before the law and has similar rights before the law, and that everybody's rights are taken equally seriously by those who enforce the law. People notice that while, of course, some are now paying over large sums of money, for the past 15 or 20 years most people were told there was no great pot of unpaid tax money. It turned out there was an enormous pot of real money, bigger than most on the Left ever suggested, deliberately hidden, with malice aforethought, to prevent people paying tax.

That ought to have been evident in the first year after the DIRT tax was introduced, when the first year's revenue from that tax was three times higher than the Revenue Commissioners had forecast, even though interest rates had dropped relative to the previous year. That was a signal that something did not match and that estimates of income, bank deposits and revenue were way out of kilter. From then on, citizens have watched a succession of issues emerge and matters arise. At the end of it all, after the best part of 20 years, some 28 individuals or companies have been convicted of serious tax offences, six of them in the last 12 months — we are getting a little better.

That does not make a case for retaining the present situation but for an independent vigorous body to deal with the issue of the criminal prosecution and criminal conviction of those who commit what is a criminal offence. We should remember it is a double offence: it is a criminal offence not to pay tax and also scandalously non-civic minded, having not paid tax, to use all the services that society provides for which such people do not pay.

Senator Dardis referred to those who try to avoid their civic duty of paying tax by moving in and out of the country. While we may not be able to force such people to pay what they ought and what most of us feel morally obliged to pay, the least we could do is to avoid giving such people the adulation of allowing them to preside over large charitable fundraising efforts, from which the charity does not raise a fraction of the amount of tax that such people have avoided paying.