Alice-Mary Higgins (Independent) | Oireachtas source

As I understand it, people can have up to €100,000 in stocks and shares, and up to 50% of their income come in the form of stocks and shares. This would mean people covered by this could be getting up to €200,000, which is quite a large amount. I would question the small-scale employee. The scheme is designed to be of benefit for those on €200,000, €150,000 or €100,000. I remind the Minister of State that the median income is less than €30,000. Therefore, we are talking about people in the top 10% of incomes who can benefit from this scheme.

It is interesting that the Minister of State indicated it is not working as he wishes for SMEs. It would be interesting to get a breakdown of the extent to which the KEEP scheme has been used by higher earners and larger companies versus how much it has been used by or is useful to SMEs, which are largely used as the logic for having it.

The Minister of State referred to a stakeholder consultation. While SMEs are stakeholders in this, PAYE workers are also stakeholders because they help to pay for it.

In terms of avoiding tax, let us be clear that this reduces the portion of incomes-----