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

How standing with a number of tax havens against an overwhelming consensus from Europe, the United States and elsewhere, is providing certainty for this country defies belief. We clearly have differing views on this.

We know that we need to dramatically increase expenditure on housing. The Minister is not giving away the figure. We believe he should double housing expenditure. In addition, we have long-needed, and after Covid-19 it is desperately urgent, to increase capacity in our health service in a whole range of areas such as ICU, staff, beds, primary care and in public health teams, not least. Similarly, for education and training, we have to dramatically increase the capacity of our third level higher education system, apprenticeships and so on.

When we used to argue for a €20 billion adjustment to fund these things, the Minister's predecessor used to always accuse us of fantasy economics. We have now discovered in the past year, in response to an emergency such as Covid-19, you can do a €20 billion adjustment and the world does not end. After Covid-19, the emergency spending needs to be sustained to give us the permanent increases in capacity in housing, health, infrastructure, education and so on but we have to be able to pay for that. Yet, the Minister is simultaneously saying he will have €500 million per year available for tax breaks.

That suggests that the level of spending we need for housing, health and education will not be sustained, and we will begin to pare back when need that spending, that ordinary people will have to pay for it in some shape or form or we will continue to base that expenditure on debt financing which is not sustainable. I want the Minister to spell out his position on that. Our view is we need to maintain the levels of spending in these areas but pay for it, not through debt financing primarily, but by beginning to tax some of the wealth, which exists in this country and has grown exponentially during Covid-19, whether it is through wealth taxes, increased corporation taxes, financial transaction taxes or taxes on the vulture funds and those who make money from property and so on. I will not list all the areas in which we think we could raise additional tax revenue. Where does the Minister stand on that?