Noonan announces amendments to budget provisions

The budget provision relating to the one-parent family tax credit is to be amended, Minister for Finance Michael Noonan has said.

He told the Dáil yesterday that he had announced its abolition and replacement with a new single parent child carer credit in the budget and section 7 of the Finance Bill, introduced yesterday, provided for the change.

“Since the announcement was made, I have listened carefully to the views of deputies and will be bringing forward an amendment to this section at committee stage, which will allow the credit to be used by a non-primary carer in situations where the primary carer has no tax liability,” he added.

Another budget measure, he said, provided for new ceiling of €1,000 an adult and and €500 a child on the amount of medical insurance premiums qualifying for tax relief.

He would bring forward an amendment at committee stage to provide that, where a student was being charged a full adult premium, the adult ceiling for relief would apply.

The current scheme of relief required a defined relationship between the policyholder and the individual insured in order for the tax relief to apply to premiums paid on behalf of others. He had decided also to remove that requirement through a committee stage amendment to the Bill.

During the debate on the Bill, FF TD Seán Fleming referred to the property tax and said he had met old-age pensioners in his clinic last Saturday who had already paid their tax for 2014 following the letter from the Revenue Commissioners.

"I ask deputies to think about their parents or grandparents who are in their 70s or 80s. When people of that generation get a bill, whether from the ESB, a phone company, an insurance company or any other service provider, the first thing many of them do is to go to the post office and pay it."

Mr Fleming said elderly people generally did not like leaving bills unpaid for days or weeks on end. Many of them had already paid for a year and a half’s property tax and he believed this was unfair.