Aodhán Ó Ríordáin (Dublin Bay North, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for their presentations. As the Chair said, I will have to leave the meeting after this. I am very impressed with the presentations.

Many of the witnesses speak about access, those on the margins and disadvantage. We still have an issue in Ireland with functional literacy with 17.9% of our adult population functionally illiterate. It is something we regularly discuss here. I suppose the witnesses have all come here looking for money so we need to cut to the chase of what the discussion is really about.

There are a couple of topics regularly bandied around in Irish political discourse. If it is said in any forum that crime is out of control, most people will nod their heads in agreement. If anybody rings "Liveline" and says "crime is out of control, Joe", most people would agree. It does not matter what kind of international statistics we have about crime in Ireland versus any other country in the world, people would still nod their head and say crime is out of control. If we say people in Ireland are overtaxed, most people would again nod their heads and say they are overtaxed. Again, not to disparage "Liveline" but the caller to that programme would say "we are overtaxed, Joe". In any pub conversation, political conversation or electoral cycle, people will assume we are overtaxed, despite it not being true.

We need much more maturity in the Irish political discourse and we cannot pretend to invest more in public services, as the delegations are advocating, with zero cost. They have provided a very reasonable suggestion of a levy on the corporate sector here, raising €550 million. We made the political argument that to give away €500 million of tax cuts in the last budget, given the state of public finances, was not the right thing to do.

I remember almost 30 years ago being a beneficiary of free education at third level and it opened doors for my family and other families like mine that could enter third level education. Maybe some doors would have been closed to us otherwise. Nevertheless, we lost the argument on the idea from the mid-1990s until recently. The suggestion was made that essentially this was an advantage from which only middle class people would benefit. The argument was that the funding mechanism should have been funnelled in a different way.

There is no way of adequately funding public services and making them free and excellent, as happens right across Europe, without having a proper discussion about the way we tax and people invest so they can feel proud of their tax system. They should feel it is a duty and we should get away from the political discourse around every levy and taxation measure. There is a language around "tax burden" and "squeezed middle" that always seems to come into the political discourse.

If I am going to nod my head and say the witnesses are absolutely right, as I want to, it would be dishonest of me to say they are right and we must absolutely fund what they want to achieve while telling people during my political campaigning that they are overtaxed. I do not believe they are. How do we fix that? How do we make that political argument and convince the people of Ireland that a fair, transparent and progressive taxation system does not need political buy-off or auctioneering around election time? Hard questions and choices must be made about how our taxation system produces highly educated and free citizenry. They are free to make choices and live their lives with an education that has lifted them. We cannot do that if we still get into the mire of comparing this tax to this levy and the assumption we are overtaxed. There is also an assumption that public services are not excellent, and that is part of the same right-wing, conservative discussion. As the witnesses are all seeking money, will they help me out?