Kathryn Reilly (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State to the House. I will not suggest, like Senator O'Brien, that the Government whacked anyone but it was not a fair budget and this is not a fair Bill.

My party has always said that the budget deficit had to be closed and we provided a fully costed alternative to the Government's budget showing how we would do everything differently. Next week, the Government parties will announce their medium-term economic strategy and the Minister for Finance told my colleague, Deputy Pearse Doherty, that he has met more than 200 individuals to discuss it. The vast majority of these representative voices come form the world of enterprise and finance and I am concerned that representative groups for the poor and disadvantaged have not been consulted as much as they should have been. Before a new strategy is implemented, equality budgeting must be considered in serious detail. I acknowledge this is Labour Party policy but the Government should test policies in the context of how they affect people in terms of gender, age, income, marital and disability status. That is the way forward and we need to examine this concept in future budgets and finance Bills.

Sinn Féin did not support the Bill in the Dáil and we will put it to a vote in the House later but we have put forward alternative proposals. We have again proposed a wealth tax but we have not costed it. However, the figures to do that have not been made available and that demonstrates a conservative approach to how we tax wealth.

I refer to a study by the Nevin Economic Research Institute and I would like the Minister of State to comment on its wealth tax proposals and its reference to progressivity in the tax system. In the working paper, Direct and Indirect Tax Contributions of Households in Ireland, Dr. Micheál Collins and Dara Turnbull, found that the poorest 10% of income earners pay as much tax as the top 10% and our tax system is less progressive than has been claimed previously. They examined figures from the CSO household budget surveys in 2009 and 2010. The poorest 10% of income earners paid a tax rate of 27.67% while the top 10% paid 29.24%. The study examined the impact of all taxation, including income tax, USC, PRSI, indirect taxes such as VAT and excise duty and levies such as television licences and vehicle taxes. A number of previous studies into the tax contribution high income groups make only considered income tax and-or PRSI and, therefore, this study was a divergence from the norm.