Colm Burke (Fine Gael)

There appears to be a great deal of misunderstanding about what is done with money collected through taxation here. I attended a meeting last night which provided information on health care, which cost €13.4 billion last year despite that only €13.317 billion in income tax was collected. Every cent taken in through income tax was spent on health care. While there is much information available on departmental websites, there is a need for greater information to be put into the public domain. This would allow the general public to identify areas wherein we are not obtaining value for money.

Senators referred yesterday to the need to get more information out on the new European treaty. We need to start at home in terms of getting out information in regard to how the country is run and how money collected through taxation is used. We should perhaps debate in this house the issue of how we can get more information out to the general public.