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

I agree with this. As the Minister probably knows, I am a long-standing advocate of a wealth tax. We have always included it in our pre-budget submissions. It is long overdue that we introduce a wealth tax. I am sure the Minister is aware that Oxfam proposed something very similar to what People Before Profit proposed. In its calculations, it reckoned that imposing the wealth tax on those with accumulated wealth in excess of €4 million would generate €8 billion, an eye-watering sum of additional revenue for the Exchequer and therefore for housing, health and infrastructure and to address poverty. You can go through the list of good causes that amount of money could be put to to fundamentally transform many aspects of our society. It is a lot of money. In our budget submission, we proposed a 2% wealth tax on accumulated wealth, excluding the family home where it is worth less than €1 million. We estimated that would raise €5.9 billion; not as much as the Oxfam wealth tax proposal but a very significant amount of money as well.

It is worth commenting on the scale of wealth that exists in this country and how it is just leaping forward every year. It would come as a surprise to people who have been crucified with the cost-of-living crisis, the cost of housing and rent and so on that while they are getting poorer, our society is getting richer by a remarkable amount every year and the vast majority of that increase in wealth is concentrated in the hands of a very small group of people. Last year, net household wealth in the country as a whole exceeded €1 trillion - €508 billion worth of financial assets and €708 billion in housing assets, less €143 billion in liabilities. The breakdown of that wealth is important to note because I presume most of the liabilities are mortgage debt. When I hear the Government say it is all housing wealth, mostly people's houses and so on, actually, it is not far off 50-50 when the mortgages of ordinary people are excluded. The wealth tax we and Oxfam propose would exclude family homes. It would not be a tax on ordinary family homes. It would be a tax on those who own multiple properties, who have large property portfolios or who have vast amounts of financial assets, which make up about 45% of net household wealth, which increased just last year by €37 billion, and which have been going up by similar figures every year for about the past ten years.

We were only able to guess at the distribution of that €1 trillion and we argued again and again that we should have proper calculations of the distribution of that net household wealth. Fair play to the Central Bank, which is where I get my figures from, in December last year, it produced a report confirming the distribution we had extrapolated in our budget submissions for the past six or seven years, which is that the richest 10% in our society own 53% of that wealth. It is a staggering amount of money concentrated in the hands of 180,000 households out of the 2 million or so in the country. A bit like the corporate stuff we spoke about earlier, there is an absolutely staggering concentration of this enormous and ever-growing amount of wealth in the hands of a small group of people. If a 2% tax were put on their wealth, excluding family homes, it could generate a huge amount of money but they would not even feel it. With that level of income, they would probably generate a return on that level of wealth in excess of 2%. They would not even feel it but it would generate billions in additional revenue for the State and all the things for which we need money so badly. It is long overdue. I know this Government is very unlikely to embrace such a proposal but I do not see why it would not.