John Gilroy (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I share many of Senator Quinn's concerns. When we raised this with the Minister's officials during a briefing, I was not very satisfied with the answer I received. There are issues of revenue reporting and abuse of the system that section 81 purports to address. Some of the examples of the abuse that have been supplied to me include an exemption where a wealthy individual gifted a house worth €400,000 to an adult child, an exemption claimed in respect of €90,000 of a cash gift to an adult child to purchase a car and furnish and maintain a house, and a taxpayer given free use of a credit card worth €150,000 a year.

These examples relate to extremely wealthy and high earning individuals yet what we would call middle income earners and the children of middle income earners are included in the same category of abusers. I fail to see how having the threshold set at €3,000, and €225,000 for a lifetime, adequately addresses this issue. In my opinion, the threshold is set way too low. It captures middle income earners and, given the increase in property values over the past 12 months, most people would now be caught within the thresholds. There is also the fact it is a self-assessment process and that Revenue cannot tell us how much money this proposal will raise in any year. To use Senator Quinn's words, it seems a very blunt instrument.