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

My next question is to Dr. Seán Healy. As well as the issues mentioned, I welcome his reference to the fiscal rules and the need to address them. Will he elaborate on the changes needed in that regard? I wholeheartedly agree with his general comments. Does he agree that EU state aid rules are also a major problem? They are related to the fiscal rules in that they emanate from the same basic neoliberal approach. We need to address them radically because they are a major blockage to public investment in infrastructure, services and so forth.

They are a major blockage to the public investment programmes, infrastructure, services and public enterprise we need.

Dr. Healy mentioned housing. I agree wholeheartedly with him that we will not solve this problem unless we get back to large-scale local authority housing provision. I wish to dig into this a little more because it is an issue that has not come up much. He also pointed to all the other problems in the current approach. Does he agree with me that there is a very significant cost to the State in the approach being undertaken, as limited and unsatisfactory as it is? He has outlined the numbers and the fact that the 47,000 units will not deal with the current numbers or those that will come on board. So much of rebuilding Ireland depends on long-term leasing arrangements of one variety or another, whether HAPs, long-term leasing initiatives or whatever. What is not being calculated even within the 47,000 is the long-term cost to the State. All this money will be going out, and the amount will increase exponentially. I do not think this has been drilled into. I do not know if the witnesses agree with me or if they have thought about this, but it is a real question we must ask. How much money will be going out over the years rather than into the creation of a fixed asset for the State and a local authority rather than privately leased housing from the State? Could the witnesses comment on this?

My last question concerns an area where we have had some disagreements over the years, namely, the emphasis on not cutting taxes for middle income earners, whether USC, water and property taxes or whatever. I wish to ask the witnesses about this again. Social Justice Ireland always rightly emphasises the issue of equality. Is it not the case that in the context of about 50% of workers, even those who earn what are called middle incomes, effectively no longer being solvent, it is entirely right for us to champion their getting to a point at which their earnings can afford the basics? To take housing as the biggest cost for people, such is its high cost that housing alone is making people effectively insolvent even if they are in the middle income earning bracket. The real problem is that, rather than opposing tax breaks at this level, which might bring the middle income earners up a little as well as the low income earners, the area we really need to go after is corporate tax. I know the witnesses would agree with that, but there needs to be much more emphasis on this and on genuine wealth taxes. These are the areas where, it seems to me, a huge amount of money is not addressed properly in budgets, even in the discussions surrounding them. It is addressed by Social Justice Ireland, but it seems to me that successive Governments are just not interested in this area at a time when profits and profit share as against wage share have gone through the roof. There seems to be no interest in a redistributive tax system, which is what we need to go for, or the recent CSO figures, which I think show that the wealthiest 10% have increased their share of all wealth from 42% to 54%. This is the problem. This is what is exacerbating inequality. We need to target in a very focused way this 10% and profits as the way to redistribute in a serious way.