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

I thank the representatives from NERI and Social Justice Ireland. As always, their contributions have been most informative. To cut a long story short, what I am hearing is that indexing and benchmarking welfare against wages is the way to do it because if we use inflation, the less well off will see a bigger gap growing between them and workers. In addition, if I heard the witnesses right, there is no trade-off with the need to provide universal services in order to prevent the cost of living from rising, particularly in those areas which disproportionately affect the less well off.

My question relates a little to that posed by Deputy Canney. How far would the witnesses go in that regard? I agree with them. I would like to know how far they would go in decommodifying - and I very much like that phrase; it is a good old socialist phrase - the things that people need to live on, so that they do not find themselves in a situation where the price of things they really need and have to have to live is running away from them. How far do we go?

I am in favour of going very far, as the witnesses can probably guess. I would like to hear their opinion on that. To take energy as an example, do we start to need to decommodify energy prices? Do we subsidise them to keep them at an affordable level or cap them? To my mind, they are absolutely indispensable to living. Do we have to decommodify them? Do we have to go back to when there was greater regulation of the energy sector when the ESB was operating on a not-for-profit basis? Otherwise, we are always prey to these market things. Do we get rid of bin charges? I think we should. They are a serious factor. For are a low-income family, they are a serious problem. I have always said that they would be a problem. The cost of them is going up and up. How far do we go? That is really the question. Should education and public transport be all free? I would say "Yes". How many of those areas have become vulnerable to inflation with a rising cost of living do we take out of that inflation spiral?

Then on wages, particularly the wages of the low paid, one thing obviously is that many of these areas like healthcare and the medical card were mentioned. We were talking about raising thresholds and tapering them. Do we go the whole hog and just say all costs for healthcare should be removed? I would say that is what we need to do. Social housing income thresholds are a real problem for people now. People who are actually homeless are now being denied housing support because they are working and their earnings are going over the threshold. Do we remove all thresholds for social housing so that social housing is not something just for the low paid but is universally available for anybody who wants to apply for it? I would say "Yes" but these are radical things to suggest. Would the witnesses say yes? My questions kind of relate to Deputy Canney's questions.

I will mention one little story as well, which kind of sums it up for me. Apartments are being advertised at the moment by an apartment company that has bought whole apartment blocks in Dún Laoghaire. It is charging €2,200 for two-bedroom and €2,100 for one-bedroom apartments. Somebody who was approved for the housing assistant payment, HAP, and was homeless went to the company and said she would like to rent one of these apartments and was told to choose whichever one she wanted. She was one of the first people in the door. She thought this was amazing, chose number 11 then went back to the company and told it she was a HAP tenant. The company told her that it did not do HAP and was not set up for it . That is outrageous, first of all. I googled the same company and it is advertising jobs to work in that company to presumably show people around who are looking to rent the places. Guess how much it is advertising jobs for. It is €26,000. Now, at €2,200 for an apartment, the person who is showing people around would have to pay 100% of his or her entire gross income in order to be able to rent one. In other words, that person could not afford the apartment. What do we do to make sure wages are actually sufficient to ensure that a person can afford the basic things like housing, healthcare, heat, etc.? Those are my questions.