Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I thank the representatives for attending. I very much welcome the emphasis they all placed on the need to break from the policies of austerity that have been pursued, to my mind and, I suspect, theirs, pretty disastrously over the past five years. Their comments echo the points made by quite a few of the organisations, such as Barnardos, Focus Ireland, Threshold and Social Justice Ireland. I refer to the need to break from austerity, focus on protecting the vulnerable, shift the tax burden to the wealthy, invest to create jobs and get people back to work, which is absolutely right.

As a relevant aside, I must state every day presents a new case that sums up what is happening in this country. I had to leave this meeting earlier because I received a call from a disabled man in Tallaght who has been told that if he, his wife and daughter do not pay their television licence fee, which they cannot afford, they will go to jail for four to six days. They will be in court tomorrow. The man told me his daughter is a lone parent, that he is disabled and that his wife is a Magdalen survivor. He also told me that, in the past two weeks at Tallaght Garda station, 24 people who cannot afford to pay a licence fee have been told to pay or go to jail. This is where we have come to. The message that the representatives are bringing in here is so important. In framing a budget, the Government should start with effects on people, just as the delegates do, rather than starting with deficits and macroeconomic imperatives and trying to squash people in order to address them.

Given that this is the position, do the representatives believe that, after five years, anybody is listening to what they are saying? My feeling is that the authorities are utterly deaf. From what I can see, the IMF is just keen to push for more repossessions of people's homes. The emphasis of Fine Gael, the major party in Government, seems to be entirely on tax reductions to incentivise the private sector, the wealthy, etc. This has not worked for 20 years, yet the party believes it will help us chart a way out of the crisis. Given that is the case, what hopes have the delegates that we can break through the official consensus?

I do not think it is the public consensus by any means. I think the delegation is expressing the public view, but the official consensus seems to be that we must pursue this austerity agenda in an utterly blinkered way even if it takes our society over a desperate cliff. What does the delegation propose we do to put forward and popularise the progressive alternative to austerity in a way that can begin to mobilise people and really put pressure on the powers that be to listen to the eminently sensible points the delegation is making this year, as it did last year and prior to that?

I understand the logic of saying "Let us work within the confines of the troika programme," because the delegation probably thinks that is all the Government will listen to and there is no point in saying anything else. One thing that strikes me very forcibly is the fact that by the autumn of this year - I would particularly like to hear what Dr. Healy and the others have to say about this - we will enter a situation in which the State will have a primary budget surplus. The narrative that we are spending more than we are taking in will not be true this year. The main reason we continue to have a substantial deficit is that this year we will pay out approximately €8 billion in interest on loans that are largely not ours. Does the delegation not think it is time for us to say that this is not on and that we should not have to beggar our economy yet again to pay interest on loans that were taken out to bail out banks? Should we begin to make the call to say we are not doing it and are freezing or putting a moratorium on it?

I am delighted that corporate tax and wealth tax were raised. ICTU is being quite cautious in talking about €250 million as a possible take from reducing some of the write-offs that the big corporates are getting. Given that the figures suggest that the big multinationals in particular made in the region of €70 billion in profits last year and paid only €4 billion in tax, which works out at about 6%, should we be a bit more radical and say they should pay a minimum effective rate of 12.5%? Everybody else is paying far more than that. Should they not be paying 12.5% when the rest of the country is being beggared? Similarly, should we not be a bit more adventurous in what we are looking for from a wealth tax in percentage terms and play that off against the urgent need to reduce or remove the universal social charge for low and middle-income earners?

Could the National Women's Council talk about women's refuges? Domestic violence is rising quite scarily. It seems there is an urgent need for a major programme of investment in providing women's refuges. I had a question about youth issues, but I will leave it at that.