Liam Herrick

Tax cuts are always going to be popular at a superficial level.

I mean, I was just reading during the week about in the States now there seems to be a race to the bottom, even from the Democrats and trying to almost abolish income tax in some parts.

But there's a contradiction, I think, between this talk about income tax coming from Jack Chamber and on the other hand, the Taoiseach making comments yesterday about structured financial help and targeted interventions for those that are most affected.

I mean, from our perspective, when we do surveys of the public on human rights and equality issues, cost of living is the number one concern for people.

But the evidence would seem to be the targeted interventions to those that are most in need.

Things like targeted welfare provisions, housing assistance.

If they're well designed and evidence based, they're more effective in terms of addressing the more acute needs.

Now, we need a fair tax system and it's always an ongoing debate.

I think the other concern at the moment, though, is that we've moved now from kind of the credible space that we were in, where you've balanced medium term discussions about tax versus spend to kind of really reactive steps.

Now, obviously, the response to the fuel protests, even before that, the hospitality VAT measure.

There's a bit of a sense that the government isn't now being sensible and planning medium term and doing it on the fly.

And that really is bringing us into a much more unstable space.

So you'd wonder about whether this is the most effective way to be going about it.

But the discourse now as well is becoming more confused.

Jack Chambers saying Fianna Fáil now and Fianna Fáil attacked.

On the other hand, the Taoiseach is saying something which I think is quite different.

Well, I'm just wondering, you know, we were told that the reason we ended up in the crisis 20 years ago was because we had too narrow a tax base.

And, you know, talking about focusing only on income tax to reduce it, I don't see the government coming forward with alternatives.

You know, there's no real measures in terms of wealth tax.

We know that the corporate tax income is unstable and we need to pivot away from it.