Minister for Finance Simon Harris insisted on Monday that his savings and investment plan is aimed at people from “middle Ireland” as he also confirmed that he will use Budget 2027 to reduce the tax burden for people “that have gotten up at a ridiculous hour of the morning” to go to work and “play by the rules”.
The comments come weeks after two academic economists – Enda Hargaden, assistant professor of economics at University College Dublin, and Barra Roantree, assistant professor of economics at Trinity College Dublin – told the Oireachtas finance committee that Harris’s plan will mainly benefit the wealthy and could create a hole in the tax base and affect the State coffers.
The economists argued that the policy is likely to be regressive in nature, benefiting wealthier individuals and leaving people on the lowest incomes behind.
“Until, quite frankly, now the tax system has meant that really it’s only the wealthy that have been able to participate in investments,” Harris said at a conference hosted by professional services firm EY in partnership with the Financial Times.
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“As a result, we live in a country where we are factually among the very best savers in the European Union, but among the very lowest participants in retail investments. And that’s not right.”
While Harris had originally signalled in March that he favoured a Swedish retail investments model, some of his officials are known to have since highlighted the attractions of UK scheme, which is less complex from a taxation point of view, allowing an annual tax-free threshold for investments and no ongoing calculations.
The Minister said that the Government aims to draw from the experience of a number of countries that have designed retail investment schemes.
“You can’t just go to another country and say, ‘We’ll take that and transpose it here’. But you can learn from others. It is certainly true that what they’ve done in Sweden is really impressive. It’s really impressive and viewed by the European Commission as one of the best examples. The UK have done one too, and so we’re looking at lots of different ones, and we’re listening,” he said.
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The Irish plan is expected to be outlined in the budget in the autumn.
Harris also acknowledged that the general system around investments is “punitive” and “far too complicated”.
The minister also reiterated that the budget will include a personal income tax package as households deal with inflation linked to the conflict in the Middle East. He previously said that people were “irked” that Budget 2026 did not introduce general increases to standard personal income tax rate bands.
“We have to reduce the tax burden on people. I don’t believe the only way to deal with a cost-of-living crisis is through social welfare,” he said. “Social welfare has a very important role to play.”
“But I’m also really conscious that there would have been so many people who would have sat in traffic today, that have gotten up at a ridiculous hour of the morning, would have dropped their children to the childminder or creche, who will play by the rules, work their backsides off, for want of a better phrase, and will still feel at the end of the week, at the end of the month, that the money that they’ve worked for just isn’t going far enough,” he added.
