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

I wish to pick Mr. Barnes up on the point about the large corporate tax revenues that are coming in and whether the best place to put them is in the rainy day fund or to pay down debt. I question that. I would have thought the lesson in the current situation is we need to invest rapidly in areas which are making us more vulnerable to this inflationary crisis - to insulate ourselves against it rather than thinking about saving up money against the rainy day further down the road. We should throw enormous amounts of money at education, training and apprenticeships. We should remove every barrier to educating and training, given that the greatest resource we have is the human beings who live here but who are wasted in their ability and talent to a very large degree because it is made so difficult for them. Large numbers of people could be contributing but it is made difficult for them to realise their potential and make a contribution.

We are seeing it now with all these bottlenecks - I love these economic euphemisms - but we have a lack of apprentices, tradespeople and people trained in areas such as construction, health and education. It would be far better to take these windfall revenues or what might turn out to be temporary revenues from a relatively small number of multinational companies and really funnel them into an area like that, because that would actually protect us. Obviously, we need to invest in sustainable energy production in order that we become less vulnerable to international price shocks in that area.

We also need a focus on the diversification of Irish agriculture when we consider that food security is becoming an issue again. We need to rapidly diversify Irish agriculture which would have a very positive environmental spin-off by reducing imports and therefore carbon footprint further down the road. It would also insulate us to some degree against inflation that is dictated by international market pressures. These are choices. There will be a debate potentially about this rainy day fund. I would be interested to hear Mr. Barnes's response.

Regarding the wage thing, the RTÉ website has a headline to the effect that the Minister, Deputy McGrath, says there will be tough negotiations ahead over the public sector pay agreement. The debate has already started with the suggestion that we cannot give these workers too much to compensate for inflation. I ask Mr. Barnes to reiterate the figure that he gave, which might be helpful in our debate in the next while. He mentioned €2 billion for pensions wages and social welfare to keep pace with inflation. I ask him to tell us what that is based on, because it is an interesting figure.

Is there not a danger that if we do not give workers, pensioners and social welfare recipients increases at least in line with inflation, we start to create the conditions for a possible recession as consumer demand begins to fall off? We know a significant driver of Irish economic growth has been consumer demand. If ordinary working people just cannot afford to spend and therefore fewer goods and services are purchased, is that not as big a danger? I take Mr. Barnes's point about not giving money to people who really do not need it or who have benefited and deciding where those thresholds would be is a matter for a serious debate. However, is there not a big danger that if we start imagining that there could be something really wrong with giving workers pay increases or giving people pension increases to deal with inflation, it could have an equally bad effect in terms of consumer demand?