Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

A person earning €140,000 is already paying a higher average rate of tax. That is already the case. Politicians such as me who believe we have tax structures at the moment that are fair and effective, and that play a role in ensuring those who have more pay more, do a disservice to those beliefs if we do not challenge the views we are hearing from our colleagues here. Let me repeat that if one earns more in Ireland, one pays a higher average rate of tax and as one earns more, one pays a higher marginal rate of tax. I ask Senator Gavan not even to try to position Sinn Féin as the party of fiscal responsibility. The party wants to abolish local property tax. It does not want to go ahead with increases in carbon tax. With due respect to Senator Higgins, she is making the case for fiscal prudence while she is also advocating higher levels of borrowing to form particular forms of expenditure. I cannot accept that argument.I will not hear Sinn Féin make the case that it is fiscally conservative or prudent when it proposes to abolish taxes that the vast majority of analysts and economists, or at least those among them who are sensible, would argue for. Local property tax plays a valuable role in the tax code and Sinn Féin wants to abolish it. Sinn Féin says it is in favour of broadening the tax base but it argues against increases in carbon tax year after year. I do not accept, therefore, that it can make the case for being prudent about what we are doing or for prudence.

I accept that we need more ICU beds. The Government has a plan in place to achieve that. It is also the case that even though the number of hospital beds in Ireland came under real strain, we managed to ensure we had enough hospital beds for those who needed them during the pandemic. We know we need to build more. For Senator Gavan and Sinn Féin to position the pandemic as an example of public service failure, as his fellow spokespersons do all of the time, is a narrative I completely reject. Our public services came under strain and we need to invest more and support them in future. Our health services, hospital beds, nurses and doctors faced a huge challenge and many of them faced unimaginable strain in the work they were doing, nonetheless the State overall, facing huge tests in this pandemic, has managed to reduce the number of people who died in the country, put in place a really good vaccination campaign and protect the economy. They are arguments that we need to hear a little bit more of when Sinn Féin make the case that what happened in this pandemic is an example of the failure of our State. It is wrong.

On the overall substance of the recommendations, we have a progressive tax code. The more one earns, the more one pays. Average tax rates go up the higher one earns. The jobs we are talking about and the people we want here in Ireland are wanted by other jurisdictions. I want those jobs here. For this reason, I do not accept the recommendation or the policies being proposed.