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

I thank the witnesses for their very interesting and informative contributions. I wish to ask about the debt situation. For a long period during the time of austerity, terror and fear about the debt burden was instilled into the population. It was given as the reason we needed incredibly draconian fiscal rules and all of the terrible austerity that flowed from that. We were told we could not possibly sustain a debt which rose to €200 billion and a debt to GDP ratio of a similar amount to the one now under consideration.

However, now it is all okay, and we have got a debt of €239 billion. Should we not be identifying the extraordinarily high levels of debt as a real risk to the economy? I would like the witnesses to give a response to that. I know there is a very relaxed approach on interest rates, and we think interest rates will stay as they are, but if they go up we are in deep trouble. The witnesses might comment on that. Our job on this committee is to identify macroeconomic risks and it seems to me that that is a serious risk. At the very least we should open up a debate about whether that is the best way to finance the public expenditure that we need. I would be the first to campaign for many of those expenditures, which I believe are necessary. The Covid expenditures are critical to sustain people. The capital expenditure on housing that has been identified by the witnesses is critical because we still have a very severe housing crisis. Would the witnesses say that we need to have a debate about whether debt financing is the best way to cover the costs of those investments and expenditures or if we need to look at taxation on accumulated wealth? I ask that question because, to put it bluntly, the borrowing we are doing is essentially from wealthy people. That is who the Government borrows money from. The Government sells bonds to wealthy people and they get an interest rate on those bonds. In crude terms, those who lend money to the State make money from the transaction, whereas the alternative is to tax some of that accumulated wealth, which I would argue is a better deal from the public's point of view but achieves the same end, in particular when it is clear that during Covid the wealth at the top has increased substantially. I would like the witnesses to comment on this. The people who have taken the hit have been the tourism workers, the entertainment workers, the retail workers, often women workers, and low-paid workers in areas of low-paid employment, while the people who have done quite well are the big owners of property, some of the big corporate interests and the very wealthy individuals. Oxfam recently suggested that the wealth of Ireland's billionaires had increased by €3.3 billion. Would we not be better off taxing those people or should we not at least discuss whether it might be a better deal to tax those people than to borrow money off them at interest?