Emmet Stagg (Kildare North, Labour)
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Question 113: To ask the Minister for Social and Family Affairs if she has completed her deliberations on the Commission on Taxation Report; and if she will outline her conclusions. [40730/09]

Mary Hanafin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)
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The Commission on Taxation is a wide ranging report containing many significant proposals. At the time of its publication, the Minister for Finance acknowledged that the Commission's Report provided a comprehensive examination of the Irish Taxation System that could set the framework within which tax policy will be made for the next decade. The Minister also stressed the longer term importance of the report in which he noted that its strategic perspective and its focus on the future will help shape the taxation system for the next decade and beyond and that the implementation of the many complex and often inter-related recommendations in the report are likely to be phased in over several years.

The Commission's report addresses a number of areas within my Department's broad area of responsibility, most notably in relation to the social insurance system, the taxation of retirement savings, the taxation of social welfare benefits including Child Benefit as well as the impact of specific taxation proposals such as a carbon tax on low income groups. I envisage that the proposals of the Commission will be considered on an ongoing basis in the light of emerging policy in these areas. Given the very diverse nature of these issues, I do not intend to present a single set of detailed conclusions around the Commission's report at this stage. However, my Department has examined the proposals from the perspective of the delivery of income supports.

In relation to retirement savings, the pension elements of the Commission on Taxation report are being considered in the context of the development of the National Pensions Framework. In relation to the taxation of Child Benefit, the Government's position on this issue will be considered in the context of the forthcoming budget and subsequent budgets and it would be inappropriate for me to comment on individual proposals at this stage.