Michael D'Arcy (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Anglo Irish Bank and Irish Nationwide Building Society are gone and the Bank of Ireland preference share has come up in the past few weeks, with a payment of €1.8 billion being made. These are huge strides. There has also been the sale of Irish Life to Great-West Lifeco for €1.3 billion, with a dividend of €40 million for the State. We have come a huge distance in the past 12 months.

With that said and being honest about it, it becomes irrelevant if one is among the approximately 400,000 people who are unemployed.

I will return to that and to jobs later. The one thing I have been talking about since I became spokesperson on finance is that we are now up to all the limits in taxation. There is no further level of taxation we can go to. We are at the very top of all of them. Our income tax is high. The OECD is of the opinion that our progressive rates are fair. They are harsh, but fair. VAT and excise are high. The only tax we could increase is corporation tax. I have made the point that perhaps we should raise that question, and the answer is, "No, we are fixing it, we will create certainty, there will be no increase in corporation tax." I made all those points because middle Ireland, those earning between €30,000 and €60,000, ends up paying all these taxes.

An opinion poll in The Irish Timesa number of weekends ago asked how much one must earn to be in the top 10% of earners in the State. People said €150,000, it is €75,000. That top 10% pay the maximum levels of income tax and higher rates of PRSI. However, people who earn between €30,000 and €60,000 are the engine of spending in this State and they are being taxed at a high rate. At some stage we will have to give those people some breaks. We are not there yet. We would love to be there, but it will take a little time.

In giving effect to the budget with today's Bill there are areas that must be welcomed. These include the abolition of the travel tax, the housing renovation scheme to pull people back from the black market and the VAT rate for the hospitality sector remaining at 9%. We all lobbied for that. There was not one of us who did not chase that down and try to get the Government to retain that rate. It is there, and it is being paid from somewhere. In our pre-election manifesto we said we would take an amount of money from the pension pots and allocate it to that. We said we would do it and we did it.