FROM THE ARCHIVES:The Dáil was concerned with speculators in January 1975 as the Fine Gael-Labour coalition government sought to introduce capital gains tax (CGT) for the first time. John Healy offered his own definition of the term in his Dáil Sketch in today's paper.
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IF IT moves, tax it: if it doesn’t, tax it again. I suppose the middle of a depression is as good a time as any to introduce a capital gains tax Bill and if it looks like a bit of black humour with 100,000 riding the national gravy-train , not to worry. As George Colley said last evening in Dáil Éireann, God is good and Fianna Fáil will be back again.
George wasn’t promising they’d scrap Richie Ryan’s National Coalition Bill (or Act as it will be when we get through with it here): George would really bring in a Speculators’ Bill, holding that the National Coalition approach just doesn’t do that. It has the name of going after the big fat cats, but effectively all it corners is the smaller man or woman.
There is, at least, agreement within the three parties: they all agree they’d love to screw the handful of Tony O’Reillys we had (or may still have) in the heady days when it was all happening and we had less to pay in gravy-train benefits.
Screwing the O’Reillys is a very popular political game: you can always feel quite safe in going after the handful. Tony has only one vote – and the begrudgers are a million. It all figures politically. Still, Richie is understanding: he’d only take a modest 26 per cent. George would hit the Fianna Fáil definition of a speculator – the man or woman who makes a quick killing with little or no economic input – quite hard. Eddie Collins would agree on the Fine Gael side; he’d start at 50 per cent and, like Colley, reduce on others.
Colley was on the mark in at least trying to identify what constituted a “speculator”. Richie didn’t. Brendan Crinion of Fianna Fáil was death down on the fellow who came down from Dublin with cash and bought up land. It seems that every man in this House will have his own version of what a speculator is before this Bill is finished. I might help some future speakers by giving my own deft definition. A speculator: someone who has more than you.
The White Paper stings have been somewhat blunted and since we are still a basically peasant parliament running an agricultural country, the mutings by Ryan of some of the original swingeing proposals will take a lot of the sharpness out of the roasting he might have expected. He got it hot and heavy in the party rooms and so did the deputies down the country after the White Paper.
On the face of it today, the entitlement to allow an individual of 55 years and over to dispose of land or a business to the family up to the value of £150,000 is generous enough. It’ll not hit too many smallholders on the snipe grass and there are enough of them around still to have some clout on the Dublin scene.
On the other hand, with inflation moving steadily at 20 per cent, it isn’t going to take too much time before a small city family business bursts through that figure.
It was Crinion who pointed out that at the rate of inflation, today’s £100,000 farm would, within five years, be valued at £200,000 and subject to CGT of £26,000.
There were some attempts made to wrap the Taca brigade (remember them? they’re folklore now) around Fianna Fáil as evidence of the party’s refusal for 16 years to bring in a CGT, but Fianna Fáil reminded the Government benches that those were the days when there was confidence in Ireland and it didn’t have 100,000 unemployed.
Colley, himself and later Ruairi Brugha of Fianna Fáil, allowed that the timing of the present Bill was bad, coming as it did when there was a lack of confidence by investors in Ireland.
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