Finance Bill reveals a keen eye for bread in Merrion Street

SKETCH:GREAT NEWS at long last for a much overlooked section of Irish society.

If you are a retiring cricket professional with turf-cutting rights in Leitrim, a passion for artisan bread and a big job on the horizon with a multinational company, your ship has come in.

Michael Noonan published his Finance Bill yesterday and he was at pains to point out that it didn’t contain any big surprises.

“This is a traditional Finance Bill,” he stressed. We wouldn’t be getting a Charlie McCreevy-style event, said Noonan, harking back to those days when his predecessor would produce a Bill which could almost be termed a second budget.

What he was doing was putting flesh on his December speech, with a few “additionalities”. He didn’t intend to waste time by reading out his statement. “If you haven’t read it already while you were waiting on me, you can read it in your own time.”

But this didn’t mean he was trying to sneak anything through. He threatened, sorry, promised that all the background material would be published a few hours later: “the full analysis, copious, so you can have a look at that and see all the arguments. So we’re not doing anything in any kind of a hidden way. We’ll give you the full information on why we made these decisions.”

As his Finance Bill is “all about jobs” he was starting out by making the business correspondents do some work to find the meat in it.

Copious? They looked thrilled.

Noonan’s approach may have heralded a departure from more prosperous times, but bricks still formed a substantial part of his routine.

Now though, when a finance minister talks about bricks and mortar he doesn’t gush about new builds and soaring property revenues, but how it has become cheaper in some parts of the country to buy an existing property rather than build one.

Once upon a tribunal time in boom town Ireland, a brick was the approximate size of a cash-stuffed brown envelope given by a developer to a politician. Yesterday, we were back to the honest blocks stacked up in a builder’s merchant and the real cost price of a home.

There were other ones too, the foreign types, called the BRICs.

Michael is very keen on building up the economy by making use of these BRICs – which is an acronym used by Department of Finance types to describe the emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China.

He’s introducing tax breaks for companies trading with these nations. Our international commercial travellers are the new heroes – like the fella who leaves home for months on end “to sell butter in Peking”.

These people need a break.

“It’s tough work, ya know, it’s tough work going around knocking on doors and guys like that and women like that, they’re keeping jobs going at home and they’re creating new jobs at home” said Noonan, lost in admiration for these latter-day trailblazers.

In order to entice their expertise to these shores, the Minister has devised a céad míle fáilte for their payslips in the form of a big cut in income tax.

But is this fair? “There are always equity considerations, and any time you give a tax break to one group and don’t give it to another group, you’re favouring one particular group,” he conceded. However, the presence of these skilled individuals could be the difference between a company deciding to make further investment here.

So he has put in a SARP under the Irish harp – a special assignee relief programme.

As the department so beautifully puts it: “this measure will help improve the quality of our human capital which in tandem with our corporate tax offering will help us compete for FDI.” It’s already giving Joe Higgins and Richard Boyd Barrett fits of the vapours.

Ming Flanagan will be happy, though. Or maybe not. There’s going to be compensation for turf cutters who give up the right to cut turf in Special Areas of Conservation.

They think of everything in Finance. The “definition of bread” is being revised for the purposes of applying the zero VAT rate.

There must have been great fun in the Merrion Street canteen when deciding that “breads will include loaves, rolls, batch bread, bagels, baps, blaas, burger buns, finger rolls, wraps, naan breads and pitta bread”. Some might say that the definition of bread is not for us to decide anymore.

Meanwhile, the professional cricketers of Ireland came of age in yesterday’s Finance Bill. They now qualify for a higher rate of relief on pension contributions.

“It’s not my game. We’re not big on cricket in Limerick.” But, given his upfront manner of disclosure yesterday, Noonan at least knows how to carry a straight bat.