Existing Section 23-type property tax exemptions, which currently cost the Exchequer €500m a year, should be scrapped, Labour leader, Eamon Gilmore has said.
Launching a strong attack this morning on Taoiseach Brian Cowen's handling of the financial crisis, Mr Gilmore said Mr Cowen had acted "in a ham-fisted way".
Property tax exemptions, including those granted to investors in recent years, should "be looked at first", he declared, "Some of those exemptions never made sense. It is difficult when you look back on them to see what these tax exemptions were about when there was a huge lot of investment."
The Labour leader also demanded State protections for people struggling to hold on to their family homes, along with measures to retrain workers.
"We have a situation where the Government has kept this under a wrap of secrecy," he said, expressing disappointment that the talks have collapsed.
"The Taoiseach has told us over the last few weeks that he was going to do it his way, that we were going to have this done by social partnership.
"As a result, he didn't tell the public the state of the public finances, hasn't told the public the full extent of the financial problems," he told journalists in Leinster House. The crux issues in the collapsed social partnership talks, which ended at 4am today, on public pay and pensions were introduced only in final day of the talks.
"He doesn't appear to understand the process. If you want agreement from people you go and tell them at the earliest possible stage what you want them to agree to. What appears to have happened is that we had general talks about the state of the economy going on for weeks and the real meat of the proposals that the Government had were not put up on the table until the last minute," he declared.
Demanding that action be taken against multi-millionaire tax exiles, Mr Gilmore said budgetary savings will have to be made shared equally. "We have to see those who gained most from the good years in the Irish economy stepping up to the plate now and taking their share of it.
"This idea that people who have big money interests in this country, who made a lot of money in this country over the years when times were good, living offshore, pretending that they are not living here at all so that they don't have to pay tax. When I see the Government facing those people down and saying, 'You are going to have to pay tax in this country, the same as you would if you were living in the US', then I will know that the Government is serious about dealing with the economic problems fairly," he said.
He described it as unacceptable "that the only people who are being asked to bear the burden and carry the can are people who have just worked for the living, whether they are in the public, or private sector.
