Dr. Seán Healy:

We have been waiting a while and it is good to be here. I thank the committee for this invitation. We are grateful for that and for the opportunity to meet the members of the committee and present some ideas. We have supplied the committee with a copy of our Budget Choices policy briefing, which sets out a fully costed budget, comprising all the expenditure and all the sources of financing, producing a balanced budget at the end of the day.

Budgets at the end of the day are about choices and they are critically important to shaping the future of society. The reality is that ten years ago we had a crash of serious proportions. The damage done through the economic and budgetary crisis of the last decade is still being felt by Ireland's vulnerable people. Despite the tremendous recovery in the economy with our getting close to full employment, low unemployment and having tremendous success on a variety of different fronts, the reality still is that almost 800,000 people are living in poverty, the largest proportion of whom are children. We still have a housing crisis, which has removed the most basic of social nets from those living on the edge, and we still have not found the political courage to say that Ireland is a low revenue economy that needs to raise some new taxes, not for it to become a high tax economy but to fund vital social infrastructure.

Interestingly, 15 years ago when we as an organisation were trying to get the Government of the day to deal with the then housing situation and to address some other issues, we were constantly warned about the danger of making those kinds of proposals because they would kill the goose that was laying the golden egg of the Celtic tiger but that goose got cooked. We cannot make any kind of investment because we do not have that money. I remember preparing a detailed policy briefing and meeting the then Secretary General of the Department of Finance for an hour and a half. He said there was no way they could deal with the housing issue to which I replied that a few years down the line we would have housing issues. I was told they were not dealing with it and there was no engagement of any kind. The time for dealing with it was apparently wrong again then.

Now we are in a new space. We hear that everything is flying but we also hear that we should not spend money because the danger is that it could overheat the economy. That raises the question as to whether the time is ever right. We as an organisation are saying that now is the time; this is the time. We need to address the key infrastructural deficits we have. Ireland has the resources and the capacity to build a fairer future for everybody. That would involve us raising a certain amount of additional tax over a period of time. We have set out on page 3 of our briefing document the way in which we calculate that. It would not even change our position with respect to our relative total tax take. If we compare all the taxes across Europe, our proposal would not turn us into a high tax country, it would just maintain our current position. We believe that over a few years we need to raise an additional €3 billion to deal with matters such as the demographic issue, the fact we will have many older people, the housing issue, infrastructural issues such as public transport, rural broadband and a number of other issues. Now is the appropriate time to do some serious work on that.

We talk about the importance of vision. Every politician would acknowledge that they have some vision of what the future should be. We suggest that people need to work for five outcomes - not in any particular sequence but they need to be worked on together - if we are to have a society that values human dignity, equality, human rights, solidarity and sustainability and those types of principles. It is not a question of getting the economy right and everything else will follow. We have been there over and over again and that does not work. The five outcomes to be worked for are a vibrant economy, just taxation, decent services and infrastructure, good governance and sustainability. On page 3 of our briefing document we set out in some detail what that means, which I will not go into now. In the context of where we are at, we would strongly argue that budgets need to be both economically sound and socially fair.