Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

It occurs to me that there is a very strong case to be made for examining the issue of minimum effective tax rates across the taxation system. I know small efforts were made to achieve this in the area of income tax in the past. It is wrong, however, that a person with a secretarial post pays a much greater proportion of her or his salary in tax than some of the wealthiest and most influential people in Ireland who have the greatest amount of business assets in Ireland and also claim to be Irish citizens.It occurs to me that, in principle, we should examine the idea of every Irish citizen with an income above a certain threshold, perhaps €100,000 or €200,000, who has business assets in Ireland over a certain threshold being liable, regardless of where they live, to a minimum effective tax rate of, say, 20% or 25% on their worldwide income unless they can show that they paid that amount to another jurisdiction. The idea that there are people who are totally stateless flying around in the atmosphere or in space, earning huge sums of money and contributing nothing but deriving significant income from this State seems to me to be wrong. They can avoid capital gains tax and a whole load of things by simply moving out of the State.

If citizenship under Article 9 of the Constitution involves not merely loyalty to the State and fidelity to the nation, one would think that Irish citizens should be willing to pay a fraction of their income given that people on the lowest salaries in their businesses in Ireland are obliged to pay a contribution to the Exchequer to fund services. I believe the time has come to examine the possibility and to end what for many people is a big scandal. They see themselves as being heavily taxed on smallish income while those who can break through the sound barrier and the glass ceiling and get out of Ireland in terms of their geographical residence seem to be in a position of having to pay nothing by way of income tax. In a republic that wants to have a degree of solidarity and social cohesion, surely the time has come for us to examine the possibility of a minimum effective tax rate on all Irish citizens.