Katherine Zappone (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State to the House. I agree with how Senator MacSharry started and acknowledge the fine work done by Deputy Noonan, assisted by the Minister of State, Deputy Hayes. As Deputy Hayes said, the Government has made many positive changes at macro level. What we are hoping now is that people will be able to feel that in their day to day lives.

Senator D'Arcy spoke about the gap between those who are working and those who are not and suggested that work needs to pay off for people. As the Minister of State knows, many of my concerns for the next year or so relate to the need to see the impact of the changes at macro level. How will they impact on the working poor and their children? Will we need more changes in order to increase the gap between the income at which decisions are made in order to protect people and the income people make from their work? That may be what we need to do. I wonder how many days or months should go by before such changes are felt at the micro level. What are the targets, particularly in the context of poverty, to which we need to attend? I acknowledge the work that has been done and hope the change the Department hopes for will follow.

I wish to focus the rest of my remarks on the miscellaneous section towards the end of the Bill. Part 6 deals with issues that are critical for a significant minority of our people. I note that significant work has been done for this minority over the past couple of years. My comments, therefore, will look both backwards and forward. This all started when we debated the final Stages of the Finance Bill in 2011, when I put forward a number of recommendations seeking to achieve parity between same sex and opposite sex couples in the tax code.

The Minister, Deputy Noonan, graciously agreed that I had identified a disparity with regard to tax relief on maintenance payments. The tax relief on maintenance was available to a spouse in marriage at the time of a deed of separation or a judicial separation. In the case of civil partners, tax relief on maintenance payments was not a possibility until annulment or statutory dissolution. That meant there was a significant time differential between the time married couples and civil partners had to wait before tax relief kicked in. The Finance Bill 2012 subsequently provided that when a civil partnership breaks down and a legally binding agreement between the parties is drawn up, this agreement can be recognised for tax purposes. It was a creative resolution. The Finance Act 2012 placed civil partnerships on the same footing as married couples in so far as it accepted that following the break-up of a relationship, people may continue to live under the same roof while being considered separately for income tax purposes.

While these changes sound quite technical, they are very significant for a huge minority of our people. Almost a year after I pointed out the inequalities that led to these changes, I identified further areas of inequality between civil partnership and civil marriage during the debate on the Finance Bill 2012. The Minister, Deputy Noonan, kindly gave an undertaking that the remaining gaps would be addressed in as far as constitutionally possible. The welcome changes necessary to fill these gaps are contained in the Bill before the House. They resulted from an exchange between the Department of Finance, the Revenue Commissioners, the Office of the Attorney General and me. I want to express my sincere gratitude to the Minister, his Department, the Revenue Commissioners and the Office of the Attorney General for examining my recommendations and for meeting me and the taxation expert and barrister, Dearbhla Cunningham, who has assisted me in bringing about these changes. When the Minister of State spoke, he did not mention the three significant changes that are involved in section 103, which is in Part 6 of the Bill.