But I presume the principle the Minister is talking about was laid down at the beginning, that is, the relationship between the single and the married allowance. That is one of the points I want to put to the Minister. Apart from what has been happening in those other countries, the Minister is correct in saying that, substantially under our own income tax code, we have treated the husband and wife as one unit. However, if we look at the allowance for a married couple versus the allowance for two single people, what we find is this: this code was drawn up a long time ago when the view taken of the role of the wife was, I hope, quite different from that which prevails today. At that time it made sense to treat the husband and the wife as one unit. I think the Minister will also agree that over the years efforts have been made by successive Ministers for Finance to try and close the gap to ensure that in the case of income tax allowances the combination of two single personal allowances would equal that of a married couple. The difficulty is that to do anything like this costs a great deal of money, and so only steps towards this were possible, but the trend has been to try to achieve this.
Here we have a new tax. We can start off with a clean sheet without building up the kind of problems that built up in the income tax system. We can determine our approach on the basis of present-day thinking, not the thinking that prevailed when income tax was introduced, nor the thinking that prevailed when the various schemes of wealth tax in other countries were introduced, as the Minister has detailed. We ought to approach it on the basis of current thinking on this matter.
From the point of view of the Minister for Finance and the revenue involved in this, the total revenue expected from wealth tax is relatively so small that it will not make a great deal of difference one way or the other which way it is fixed. But one thing is certain: it will be far easier to fix this matter now than it will ever be in the future. If we pass this Bill with this kind of thinking in it any Minister for Finance in the future will have a great deal of difficulty if he wants to remedy the position, whereas now it is relatively easy to remedy it without any great financial difficulty for the Exchequer.
The fact is that more and more nowadays—I would hope to a very wide degree—it is accepted that a married woman is entitled to be treated as an individual in her own right, but the whole drafting of this section is based on a very antiquated approach. I shall be dealing with this point later but, to reinforce what I am saying, I point out now to the Minister the reference in paragraph (a) to "the wife"—not to the spouse, the wife. The whole concept is that the husband is the one who counts and the wife and minor children are appendages to be added in to create this unit. I agree that this was certainly the approach in previous legislation. It was the approach, as the Minister pointed out, in legislation introduced in other countries, but legislation in the main introduced a very long time ago, and I want to put it to the Minister now that Dáil Éireann, in 1975, should not be adopting that approach, remembering that the financial implications in particular for the Exchequer are not really great.
I say that on the basis that my recollection is that the best estimate of the yield from wealth tax that the Minister for Finance could give us was £1,500,000. In those circumstances what I am talking about here will not make any major difference to the Exchequer. Is it not time we approached this on the basis of treating a married woman as an individual in her own right? If we look at the consequences of not doing that we see the very strange anomalies that develop. One of them I have already developed, namely, that two single people get an allowance under the wealth tax of £140,000 whereas a married couple get an allowance of £100,000. That is a substantial difference operating against the married couple. But we have the even stranger position that a separated married couple get an allowance between them of £140,000 whereas the married couple living together normally get an allowance of only £100,000. These anomalies — I do not think they can be described as other than anomalies — arise because the approach to the whole question is taken from much older legislation which was drafted at a time when the general public attitude in regard to the role of the married woman was different—at least, I hope it was different—from what it is today.
I would have expected that this Government, which likes to present itself as being forward thinking — I may have another view as to whether it is or not — would have taken the opportunity presented by this Bill to signify their acceptance of the role of the married woman as an individual in her own right, entitled to at least the same treatment as a single woman or a single man or, indeed, as her husband. Effectively what we are doing here is saying that a woman who is single—she may be living with a man, but that is irrelevant—is entitled to an allowance of £70,000 under this Bill. If, however, she is married she is not to be treated as the equal of a single woman or a single man and she is not to be treated as the equal of her husband because this section goes on to talk about "the wife of the individual"— not the spouse, the wife. This is out of date. It is an antiquated approach. It would be quite easy for the Minister to adopt a modern approach and I am urging him, appealing to him, to do just that.
