Member's statement: Cross-border Working: Double Taxation
Member's statement by Mr Pádraig Delargy on .
- MLA
- Mr Pádraig Delargy
- Party at the time
- Sinn Féin
- Date
- 6 October 2026
- Type
- Member's statement
- Business
- Members' Statements
- Heading
- Cross-border Working: Double Taxation
- Assembly identifier
- Official Report component 5776555
Read the official Assembly record
Text
Double taxation continues to be a huge issue for people across many border communities such as mine. It is a block to many people in accessing employment. Partition continues to create barriers, and Brexit has made them worse. The recent Irish Business and Employers Confederation and CBI report on all-Ireland labour mobility highlights huge potential, but it also highlights the barriers that remain around taxation, social protection and employment. A recent Economic and Social Research Institute report states that up to 19,000 people regularly move from the North to the South and from the South to the North for employment. As a result, we see that trade, investment and supply chains are increasingly operating across Ireland, but our systems have yet to catch up. We therefore have a system in which people who move between Derry and Donegal or Newry and Louth, and in many of our other border communities, face double taxation and a system that treats them unfairly, first in accessing the workplace, and, secondly, in how they interact with the workplace, particularly with regard to taxation and administration. We see that particularly in the case of remote and hybrid working. Employers can be reluctant to recruit people in the North because of the cross-border arrangements, which are much too complicated.
I recognise the work of my colleagues John O'Dowd, Caoimhe Archibald and Conor Murphy on that issue, alongside, in particular, Border People, the Centre for Cross Border Studies and the chambers of commerce, which have pushed the practical solutions. We also need to see the removal of barriers to student mobility, ensuring lower student fees, increased post-graduate loans and improved maintenance support, so that our economy is as integrated as it can be and we see the best employment solutions and the best opportunities for all of our young people and workers across Ireland.
307 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.
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