Party will be urging 'super tax rate on incomes over €100,000'

TRANSPORT:THE GREEN Party will be calling for a new super tax rate on incomes of more than €100,000 in Government negotiations on the emergency budget in April.

Finance spokesman Dan Boyle said the size of the exchequer gap to be filled is “large” and the mechanism to remedy that “will be new taxation measures”.

He said yesterday that “we will be putting a particular emphasis on the need for a new super tax rate on incomes over €100,000. The negotiations will be talking about the type of rate that needs to be set in the context of other taxation changes that are likely to happen”.

Minister for Communications Eamon Ryan said of the report on bank executive remuneration that the Government is “not bound by its recommendations”. At a press conference at the end of the party’s convention in Wexford he was asked about speculation that it would recommend a cap on executive salary of €800,000.

He said “we’ll obviously read and do a very keen analysis”. But “we’re not confined by their advice and recommendation. And my own instinct is to look at international examples of banks where caps were put in place in banks where the State has a stake”.

Mr Ryan insisted that on matters of public transport if “hard decisions” have to be taken on the reallocation of money, the Greens’ “absolute and utter determination and conviction is that that money goes to public transport and the likes of those project which provide for our future when oil is not going to be cheaply available”.

Emphasising projects such as Metro North and the rail interconnector, he said the party would go into budget negotiations “absolutely determined to see those projects delivered”.

Mr Ryan said the key message they wanted to give was that “there’s a way of turning the economy and the country around”.

He said: “We shouldn’t be prescriptive but very much concentrate on the revenue raising side rather than cost cutting, because we’ve been working at cost cutting for a time.” The “difficulty is 80 per cent of Government spending is in health education and social welfare so if you start from a basis of excluding those three sections you’re not going to be able to achieve the overall objective of the necessary adjustments”.