MacGill Summer School: Fine Gael's spokesman on enterprise, trade and employment, Mr Phil Hogan, has accused the Government of taking taxpayers' money "under false pretences" through its 2 per cent levy on insurance policies.
Calling for the abolition of the levy, which netted the Exchequer €65 million last year, Mr Hogan said the Government's response to the problem of high insurance costs had been "to sit on the sidelines and feign an inability to do anything".
In an address to the MacGill Summer School in Glenties, Co Donegal, last night, Mr Hogan said that instead of charging customers, the Government "could put down a marker to the insurance companies that failure to pass on savings to consumers by way of reduced premiums will result in the introduction of a levy, similar to the bank levy imposed earlier this year".
In relation to the business sector, he said: "The Government should immediately roll back the advance payment of corporation tax, which was imposed in the last budget.
"Imagine the uproar if workers were obliged to pay PAYE in May for the wages they expected to earn the following December. This is what the Government did in the last election, all in the context of increasing costs and charges facing the very business sectors that they expect to sustain and grow employment."
Mr Hogan also predicted that Ireland would become "more unequal" if it remained on its present course. "We will see growing levels of unemployment and higher borrowing for current expenditure or higher taxation . . . You can be sure that the marginalised will bear the brunt of pain, not the doyens of Irish society that will grace certain tents in the Galway races next week."
Describing Ireland as "undoubtedly closer to Boston rather than Berlin", he said much of the progress achieved in recent years ran the risk of being dissipated through Government "complacency and deceit".
"First of all, they have penalised middle-income tax payers by bringing more into the top tax rate. Many here might find it hard to believe that a middle-income employee is now paying the same marginal tax rate as a chief executive or a senior counsel. In fact, they are probably paying more because they aren't availing of tax-avoidance schemes that are available to the very rich."
Mr Hogan also criticised the Government's decision to cede responsibility for cost inputs in the economy "to a plethora of as yet unproven and somewhat tin-pot regulators.
"We perceive an increasing presence of regulators in the economy as an indication of the abdication of responsibility and the transferral of 'guilt' by the political system to unaccountable bureaucrats who are largely pre-occupied with the niceties of economics, with no social or community focus in their roles."
