Seanad debates
Tuesday, 3 December 2019
Finance Bill 2019: Committee Stage
2:30 pm
Michael D'Arcy (Wexford, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source
The Senator is plucking a number from the sky so that she can pretend that this scheme is a terrible thing. She referred to specific allocations for healthcare and social protection but she did not mention the overall healthcare allocation of €19 billion for 2020, which is the highest amount ever. She did not refer to the €20 billion budget for social protection. The Senator gave a concocted figure of €105 million for SARP without saying where it came from. The figures I am giving come from the Indecon report. It showed that the companies that availed of SARP for their employees in 2017 paid €2.5 billion in corporation tax. If we want to pay our bills, fund the health service and retain the social protection budget, we have to bring in the moneys that enable us to do so. These companies employed more than 155,000 people directly and, for every employee, another is employed indirectly as part of the supply chain. They also paid €1.9 billion in PAYE taxes. The cost to the State of the SARP scheme of which they availed was €28 million in 2017, set against the €4.4 billion paid directly by those companies to the Exchequer, which makes up some of our public service expenditure budget. I would love to say that we do not need this programme but the reality is that the countries with which we are in competition for foreign direct investment have their own SARP schemes. The Senator will not want to hear that and she may not agree with what I am saying, but this is how it works in the real world in which we have to get money in if we are to pay our bills.
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