Joan Collins (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance)

Yes, everything over €100,000 at 95%. That would bring a massive amount of money into the economy.

We are in a serious situation. We are in a crisis situation and those who have the money should be putting into the economy what they need to over the next period of time rather than the Government coming back repeatedly to the blind, the disabled and the low-paid worker. There should be higher taxes on higher incomes.

We should take control of our natural resources and develop a national jobs plan for economic recovery. In the 1940s and 1950s, the Government brought into play the ESB and Bord Gáis to redevelop the economy. Every home and part of the country was supplied with electricity. There is now an opportunity for every household and company to be retrofitted with water supplies, insulation and the like. That can be done through a public jobs plan to get people back to work, to fix the water supplies and to build schools where children are still in pre-fabs for which the Government is paying large sums on rent every year. We should be building proper schools for children for now and for the future. All this can be done and the Government can play a key role in creating jobs in this regard and have a proper public jobs plan to be driven by it.

There are alternatives and we have put them forward, time and again. We are not preaching. We are merely putting forward an alternative way to raise money. That is not being cocky in any shape or form.

These are the issues that people raised with us at the doorsteps when we canvassed during the general election campaign. I am sure they are the issues that were raised with others who were elected as Deputies. The last election should have been a referendum on the EU-IMF loan. The message we must get out to Europe is that it is a loan, not a bailout.

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