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

On research and development, we have shortages of skills all over the place, for example, in the health service, construction and teaching, and we can go through a long list of places where we do not have people where we need qualified specialist people. Should we be rethinking our way of looking at this? If research and development tax reliefs are currently largely benefiting a small number of multinationals and have, therefore, led to our economy being very dependent on a few sectors, which we now realise are quite vulnerable when we look at what has happened with layoffs, there is a sort of opportunity cost. Even if it is given to SMEs, it is not actually meeting our strategic need to have people doing research and becoming highly qualified in areas where we have major deficits. In other words, we are just thinking jobs, jobs, jobs, and we think it is great that we have loads of jobs in one area, but the problem is that we have loads of areas where we desperately need people and we do not have them.

To give one example that springs to my mind, one of the problems in our health service is the lack of integration of computer systems and, indeed, we were hacked by the Russians and all the rest of it. We have a completely rubbish sort of computer system in our health service but then we have loads of people working on stuff for Google, Facebook and God knows what. Is there a case for looking at where public expenditure should be going in order to get people qualified in IT who would help our public services, rather than just saying that any job which may be produced by a research and development tax benefit is a good job? Does Mr. Coffey get my point? It may be a slightly convoluted argument.

On a question to all of the witnesses, do they have any comment on the Oxfam stuff? They may not agree with the wealth tax but do they have any comment on the Oxfam figures, which essentially show that the rich are getting richer every year, and that there is a greater year-on-year concentration of wealth at the top, whereas 50% of the population have only 1.1% of the wealth. That gap is growing all of the time. Are any of the measures that are being proposed in the Commission on Taxation really going to shift that trajectory? It seems to me that some of them are laudable, and there are some I am not so sure of, but is there any real belief that they are going to address that problem? To me, that is a problem and I believe we need quite radical measures if we are going to shift that trajectory. I ask the witnesses to consider that.

I have one very last question.