Dr. Seán Healy:

What I mean by that is that we look at sources, including the Irish strategic investment fund, commercial semi-State borrowing, domestic pension funds and so on. Groups like the credit unions have substantial sums of money, but they are blocked by investing it due to particular rules. It seems that those rules are meant to achieve safe investment, but that can surely be done by simply putting the supports in to make sure that it goes in that direction. We can raise €7 billion from these sources and from the European Investment Bank, which can contribute half of that total. On the other side, we should spend this on renewable energy, new social housing units, primary care facilities, energy efficiency, eliminating school prefabs, on early childhood care and education, public health care facilities, non-national road improvements, water services and facilities and a whole lot of other things. If we go down that route, we believe that 84,000 additional jobs will be created and we will get €2.9 billion in additional tax revenue and savings. It seems to us that there should not be a blockage that can allow us to pay off a fair bit of the capital in that off balance sheet way from the increased tax take and savings that will be made by taking people off the live register and so on.

We are strongly in favour of broadening the tax base rather than trying to concentrate on any particular area. We try to come up every year with ways of broadening the tax base, which is very important.