Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Chair and thank Dr. McDonnell for his presentation. I listened to it with interest.

Going back to what Deputy Durkan was talking about, the person earning €50,000 and not making any progress, financially or for their time, I come across cases where college fees become a problem. Children are going to college and it becomes a huge burden. It involves thousands of euro. If they have two or three children, it can be a multiplying factor. Would Dr. McDonnell see it being reasonable to take the cost of college fees out of the system for people earning up to a certain level ad infinitum, not only on a one-year basis, so that one targets supports to people who are working, who are paying their taxes and who seem to be paying for everything out of their net income? That is the biggest problem.

Another area that we often forget is where we have money now and the problem could be how we spend it. If one takes people with disabilities who have a particular additional cost of living with that disability, forgetting about the normal or abnormal cost-of-living increases, as the Indecon report has stated, is now not the time to put in place a payment for people with disabilities that will be there forever because the disability, unfortunately, will be there for as long as people are alive?

I hear what Dr. McDonnell says about the working family payment, that it might not be called the working family payment and might be called the working person payment so that single people can benefit from it, because people on lower-to-middle incomes are actually the people who are getting caught for everything. In that case, would Dr. McDonnell agree that it is time to raise the tax bands so that they can earn more, without having to pay as much tax on it, up to a certain level and target not only low income but also middle income earners who need that lift at present?

If one takes infrastructure and how to deal with that, we spoke about the national development plan in an earlier session. One is talking about investing, but not everything on the one day and then having boom and bust. For instance, I got an email the other day saying there are not enough of train carriages on trains. If we were to buy more train carriages now, it would not be a big capital cost. One can buy them, I am sure, fairly quickly. One could end up creating more capacity, as the Chairman said, in having more people using a system at a lower cost yet getting a better return for one's investment. There is such investment that I would like to see being made in a budget. It also needs to be planned, not only to do that in this budget and then see what will happen next year.

We need to be looking at a five-year plan. I do not know what the witnesses think of my ideas but those are some of them.