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

To follow up on Deputy Pearse Doherty's point that needs are not being met, is there not a circle here that cannot be squared? I accept that the Minister is getting the same representations as the rest of us from people who have been approved for home care packages but are not getting them. They have been told quite simply that it is not in budget. The Minister is not providing an answer as to how we are going to provide for those needs, other than to say that some needs are being provided for. The fact of the matter is that a many needs are not being met. I met hospital consultants today who were discussing gynaecological care. Some 20,000 or 30,000 people are waiting for gynaecological care and this need essentially cannot be met because we do not have enough doctors. The consultants argue that we cannot recruit more consultants because of the two-tier pay system. New entrants are not willing to work beside people who are being paid 57% more than them just because they happened to become consultants before 2012. They find this obnoxious and they are not going to do it. They are leaving the country instead.

The Minister could make a similar point about housing and say the Government is ramping up housing and more social housing is being built. It is not enough, however. To take affordable housing as an example, not even the Minister could argue that this is being delivered. Nothing is being delivered on affordable housing and the little that is being delivered may be unaffordable. The National Development Finance Agency, NDFA, explained to us that the particular way the affordable housing scheme is set up means affordability is based on site-specific costs, market conditions and so on. The result is that rents for cost rental housing are €1,200 a month, which is not affordable for someone earning the average industrial wage or less. This can only be resolved by the State providing a bigger subsidy or extending the finance period, which are dictated by budgets. We are not meeting the need. I could give many other examples in areas such as infrastructure and climate action.

Is €700 million anywhere near enough to meet the current and capital expenditure requirements we need to address these problems? I put it to the Minister that it is not enough. The only way this dilemma can be resolved is by raising additional revenue. I agree with the Minister, and disagree with some of my colleagues in the Opposition who think borrowing is the way forward. I am not in favour of running deficits or borrowing. In fact, I find it shocking that we have paid out €60 billion in debt repayments over the past ten years. That is the equivalent of building three national children's hospitals a year. It is unbelievable that we have almost forgotten about that discussion. There is a huge black hole of debt in the economy. That is toxic debt and we should not be repaying it, but it is shocking either way.

Do we not have to find additional sources of revenue to increase the envelope available to us? The Minister will never go as far as we would, but does he not agree that we need to start looking at sources such as profits, capital taxes, wealth taxes and employer's PRSI, which we could increase significantly? Direct expenditure is closely scrutinised but there is no scrutiny of tax expenditures, even though they amount to billions of euro worth of tax giveaways, mostly to the wealthy and to big corporations. While this committee has started the process of examining these huge tax expenditures, such scrutiny is a hell of a long way from where it needs to be. If that money were redirected into direct expenditure in the areas of need we have just identified, we might be able to meet some of the demands building up.