John Crown (Independent) | Oireachtas source

Every public servant and every Minister should speak for themselves. Every chief executive officer in a Department in the Civil Service should be given the job in rotation once a week of taking a press conference and answering questions unspun. We should end mandatory retirement so that people who wish to continue working do not become dependent on the State. We should have a once-off Celtic tiger windfall tax for people who made large profits on real estate during the boom years. We hear all the hard stories about people wiped out by the boom years but an awful lot of people made money. I am not a fan of wealth taxes because people should pay tax once on the money they have but this is a national emergency.

People like me, who have large incomes of hundreds of thousands of euro, should be charged more income tax. It is not widely known but Irish consultants, uniquely, had a 4% increase in income tax last week. None of us is complaining about it and I would be happy if the Minister added 1% more to get rid of measures such as this. The Minister should also fire a few quangos and allow for early redemption of the ¤100 billion in pension assets largely held outside the State. There is a tax incentive for the assets to remain outside the State when people often desperately need the money. They cannot wait to retire because they may lose their homes to negative equity or their business to a failure of credit from the banks. There are many measures that can be taken. In one fell swoop we could fix this problem by cutting one half of the ¤55 million we spend every year on greyhounds and dogs.