Simon Harris

That is okay, but we are not. We are committed to the local property tax as a sustainable way of trying to fund local services. We have a situation where more is now being returned to local authorities. Council chambers across the country, including the Deputy's own councillors, engaging in discussions about what to do with that revenue base that the local authorities now have. We have also increa…

Residential zoned land tax is a self-assessed annual tax that is calculated at 3% of the market value of land within its scope. It is charged on 1 February each year beginning, as the Deputy said, in 2025 and it applies to land that is zoned for residential use and is serviced and identified on maps published by local authorities, but which is not residential property. The RZLT aims to prompt resi…

That is correct. Some 160 claimed exemptions and 585 requested deferrals.

The deferrals relate to people seeking to change the use of land. However, I will get the specific note from Revenue in relation to that for the Deputy. The tax is working reasonably well. The other questioner here, Deputy O'Gorman would have pushed for this and was an active supporter of it within the previous Government. We brought it in, and we are seeing some encouraging signs. The Deputy may …

In my new role, I am learning not to muse on tax changes outside of a budgetary process other than to say that we continue to keep the effectiveness of the tax under review. We will continue to review it in advance of forthcoming budgets. Our view is that we have a tax in place in relation to taxing residential zoned land where there is not residential property on it. We have put a system in place…

I thank Deputy Brennan for his kind words. I look forward to working with him as well. Capital acquisitions tax, CAT, applies to both gifts and inheritance and is charged at a rate of 33%. For CAT purposes, the relationship between the person giving a gift or inheritance and the person who perceives it determines the maximum amount, known as the group threshold, below which the CAT does not arise…

I am conscious of the area of the country the Deputy represents and the area of the country that I represent. I am also conscious that property prices, inflation, capital tax, etc., can place a real burden on people, particularly in circumstances where they inherit, for example, family homes. These are real issues that come across our desks and into our lives as we interact with people we represen…

I will, because without pre-empting any future budgets, the last time we did this in budget 2025 we decided to move each of the bands and that was appropriate. We need to look at this in the round. There are always competing demands on what you can do in relation to a tax package each year but we have only delivered one budget out of five. We have four more and if we continue to keep the economy i…

I thank Deputy McCormack very much for his kind words. I look forward to working with him. I also very much welcome this question because while I look at it from the Department of Finance perspective now, previously in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade I engaged significantly on trade and tariffs at an EU level. It is so important we continue to, as he rightly says, monitor the impact al…

The Deputy is very much right. That is the reason we set up the Government trade forum. We have in the room now all relevant Departments, including mine, along with the Departments of Foreign Affairs and Trade, public expenditure, agriculture and enterprise. We also have the IDA and Enterprise Ireland meeting ISME, Chambers Ireland, IBEC, the American Chamber of Commerce Ireland and all the variou…

I absolutely will. The Deputy is right. This is the sector that got away from the final deal. I know from talking to the EU Commission and counterparts this is the next big priority for Europe because of course it affects us here via Tullamore Dew and Irish Distillers but it also affects France, Italy and other countries, as well as Scotland, if you like, outside the EU. This is an issue we as a c…

I am not and I did not know what happens. I thank the Deputies for these questions. I propose to take Questions Nos. 8 and 15, together. The VAT registration thresholds are, as the Deputies note, subject to the requirements of EU VAT law, with which Irish VAT law is obliged to comply. Under the directive there is an upper limit of €85,000 on registration thresholds that member states may apply. …

I thank the Deputies for their questions. To recap my position, I have tried to outline why, to date, there has always been a policy differential in the threshold for goods and services. There is some validity to that. The Deputy is right that there are some European countries that might have a higher threshold than Ireland, but Ireland certainly has one of the higher thresholds, so we are certain…

I was checking the figure on the R and D tax credit while the two Deputies were speaking. Some 87.5% of claimants of the R and D tax credit are SMEs, so while the greater quantum is claimed by FDI because of the size of FDI, the overwhelming number of applications is coming from SMEs. That shows it is working and has the potential to work even better. I would make the point that we raised the thr…

I thank the Deputy. I have heard him speak in this House passionately about lots of things, including the issue of dereliction in recent times. Dereliction during a housing emergency is a particular challenge as something that should be almost socially unacceptable. We have an emergency. All of us recognise that. We have different views on how best to tackle it, but tackling dereliction needs to b…

I enjoy these rare moments of agreement between Deputy Gould and me. He often shouts at me from the other side of the House and the odd time I shout back as well. As we come up to the Christmas period, it is nice to have a rare moment of harmony so let us cherish that. We are having this rare moment of harmony because we both recognise that dereliction is a real scourge. Deputy Nash made this poin…

The point Deputy Gould makes about what is derelict, and getting all of that right and underpinning it in legislation, is exactly what we will have to do when we are bringing the legislation through this House. The Deputy is right when he says that it cannot be just a lick of paint or somebody pretending to resolve the dereliction. We all have to be serious about this. We can debate the structure …

I thank Deputy Butterly for her kind words and I look forward to working with her, as we already do on many issues. The living cities initiative is a targeted measure which is aimed at specific areas in need of regeneration. It currently offers income or corporation tax relief for qualifying expenditure incurred in the refurbishment and conversion of qualifying residential and commercial building…

There is so much potential in the M1 corridor, that north-east economic area. The announcement of the partnership between Dundalk Institute of Technology, DKIT, and Queen's University Belfast has the potential to be transformational. I really believe that. Coupled with the living cities initiative, that will bring much-needed Government support through the tax system to Dundalk and Drogheda to tac…

Deputy Neville is right. We have to be willing to look at every possible way to help tackle vacancy and dereliction but also to bring back vibrancy in towns, including towns that are not classified as older towns but are vibrant and growing and often have other challenges such as the population growing so fast and keeping up in terms of the infrastructure. The Deputy regularly keeps me on my toes …

I thank Deputy Neville for the good wishes. I look forward to working with the Deputy on all things Kildare and all things national in this role, as we do already. I thank the Deputy for this question in what is an important and growing sector of the Irish economy. The EU legislation which governs the harmonisation of taxes on alcohol across the Union allows member states to offer certain excise …

That is a fair point. I will provide some figures which might be useful. I can send them on in tabular form to the Deputy with more detail. Since 2021, the amount of relief claimed by way of remittance is around €7 million to €8 million per annum. Most claimants are understood to opt for remission. In terms of claims made each year, there are around 70 to 90. To give an example, in 2024, the most …

I thank Deputy Butterly. I am happy to take that opportunity. I will ask the Ministers for agriculture and enterprise to engage with her in relation to that. The ideal is an ecosystem that works for everyone but I do not profess to be extraordinarily knowledgeable on this. I would welcome that because tillage is a sector we want and need to support. It is one of the sectors, from an agricultural p…

That gave me an awful wake-up call. I had not thought of it like that but it is factually correct. I thank Deputy Ó Cearúil for raising this question. Future Forty is a really important piece of work. I can say that because I had nothing to do with it. It happened before I was in the Department of Finance. Huge credit is owed to the officials in the Department of Finance, the chief economist John…

The Deputy is correct. Future Forty does highlight that expenditure related to demographic ageing is expected to grow substantially in the coming decades. Healthcare, long-term care and pensions are expected to take up an increasingly larger amount of the Government's budget. Mitigation of the ageing costs will depend on improving efficiencies and ultimately boosting productivity in public service…