In a statement, Richard Boyd Barrett has said answers received from the Minister for Finance to questions he submitted about the earnings and tax paid among the highest earners in the country revealed definitively that the super-wealthy in Irish society are paying very low levels of tax.

The answers reveal that the top 1% of earners- earning an average of €403,000 per year pay an effective tax rate of only 28%.

The answers show also that the top 10% of earners on average earnings of €136,000 per year pay an effective tax rate of only 24%.

According to Deputy Boyd Barrett the figures show clearly that substantially increasing the effective tax rate for the very highest earners could bring in several billion annually in extra revenue to the state – offsetting the need to visit further cuts and austerity on ordinary workers, the unemployed and the most vulnerable in society.

Richard Boyd Barrett said,

“These answers prove what we have been saying all along. The super-wealthy in Irish society are not paying their fair share and are being protected from the ravages of austerity while ordinary people are being crushed with cuts and taxes and many are being driven into poverty.

It is simply incredible for example, that the top ten thousand earners in this country have annual earnings of just under 600,000 per year but are paying less than 30% tax on this income. If this group alone were forced to pay 50% of their earnings in tax they would still be fantastically rich but it would bring an extra 1 billion in tax revenue.

This alone would do away with the need for the household charge, cuts in child benefit, cuts in fuel allowance, SNA cuts, cuts to lone parents and a whole range of other brutal cuts that have been visited on the least well off and vulnerable sectors of our society.

What these figures show is that this government has choices and that so-far the choice they have made is to savage working people and the poor while protecting the super-wealthy elite. This injustice has to end”.