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

I thank the Ministers for their engagement with the committee. One of the new challenges we are facing is that of labour shortages, which are posing difficulties for our ability to deliver a lot of the housing, other infrastructure and services we need. Everybody is looking for workers at the moment. The argument the Ministers are making is that we cannot just allocate loads of money to do things if we do not have the capacity to deliver them, because that just creates inflation. I get that. On the other hand, a lot of things need to be done and they need to be done urgently. There must be a significant focus on how we increase our capacity.

I have not seen the latest figures on migration. They always seem to be a bit delayed but the Ministers might know more than we do. Does they know how many people are leaving the country? We have net immigration at the moment but I would like to know the figure for how many are leaving. Anecdotally, we hear lots of young people in college and so on saying they cannot afford to live here and are going to leave. I do not know the exact figures. The last ones I saw indicated that 40,000 to 50,000 people are leaving per year. There are more coming in but in a situation in which we have labour shortages, if we can convince people to stay, it would increase our capacity. That is something on which we should be focused. How do we get young, educated people, whom we paid to educate, and who, in may cases, do not want to leave, to stay? Are the Ministers thinking about that and, if so, what ideas do they have on that front?

We hear a huge amount about the housing issue. I know we cannot solve it overnight but we can do more. I will not get into that debate now. There is a significant and growing cohort of people who are over the thresholds for income support to pay their rent. As we have discussed at this committee, the Commission on Taxation and Welfare has said there should not be cliff edges in eligibility for supports. In that regard, we need to think about housing income support for people who are over the social housing income threshold. We have acknowledged the need to provide cost-rental and affordable housing for that cohort but it will be quite a while before it is delivered on the sort of scale we want. In the meantime, those people are renting or find they are not able to afford the rents charged. I suspect that is a big reason some of them are leaving the country. I ask the Ministers to think about that. It is still very difficult to find accommodation but if people can find a place and they are below the social housing income threshold, they will get approximately 85% of their rent paid through the housing assistance payment, HAP, scheme, if they can find a HAP landlord. If they are over that threshold, they get zilch. Would it not be sensible expenditure to assist people on a modest income of €50,000, €60,000 or whatever who are facing extortionate rents? I am not saying that is the solution to the housing problems. The solution is the provision of more affordable, cost-rental and public housing. In the interim, however, would it not be sensible to give some assistance to people in that cohort, tapered based on income, to enable them to pay their rent?

Another group that should be considered for support comprises those who are coming into the country. I have heard anecdotally that while many of the Ukrainian people who have come here are working, there also are a lot who are not working because of childcare issues. They cannot afford childcare but they could potentially be contributing by working and helping us to deal with the skills shortages. The same is true of asylum applicants. Are people going into the direct provision centres and finding out what skills residents have, what they want to do and so on? Is anyone trying to help them to get into the labour force rather than leaving them to rot in direct provision? Helping them would be good for them and good for our society. It would increase our capacity and labour force and all the rest of it. The Ministers should think about that.

The Ministers are saying we have all these surpluses but if we spend all the money, it will be inflationary. The Government does not want to overdo it and wants to put money aside and so on. I get that. However, there is also a distributional question that is not often considered. In essence, inflation has worsened the plight of the vast majority of workers in terms of their real income but, at the same time, we see profits have gone up.

A redistribution is happening with inflation and we should be addressing that. I say this every year but this is an idea whose time has come. The other way we can spend more without having the inflationary effect, and this has been stated by the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council, IFAC, among others, is to raise extra revenue. Surely the time has come for wealth taxes. Our committee is now looking at the notion. If huge numbers of workers are losing out because of inflation while a relatively small group of people are doing quite well, we need to think about raising additional revenues through redistributive taxes that take some of the enormous growth in wealth and income for a small group and redistribute it to those who are losing out as a result of inflation. I ask the Ministers to respond to those points.