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

I thank IFAC for all its work and I thank the witnesses for the presentation. If I understand correctly what they are saying, their advice is that the Government should not generally go beyond the 5% rule - the rule that is not a rule- and if it does, it needs to pay for that with additional taxation. I think that is essentially what they are saying. They seem to lean towards the most prudent way to spend the money we have being with capital and infrastructural development because of the huge deficits in housing, water infrastructure and climate mitigation. You can go through the list of infrastructural investment that is required. Would they agree we have a bit of a dilemma in that regard in that they also point to the fact that, as I noted as I was reading the section on construction, in order to do this infrastructural investment, we need workers and we are desperately short of those? It is not just true in infrastructure. It is true in just about every sector of the economy. We are chronically short of workers and skills in particular areas. If you talk to anybody in any or a lot of these sectors, they will say that one of the barriers to recruiting people is poor pay or at least pay that is not sufficient to put an affordable roof over their heads. That is why people ask why should they go and work in these sectors. In order to resolve the infrastructural deficits, in which they agree we need to invest, do you not end up having to increase pay at least to the level of inflation to deal with the cost-of-living hikes and particularly with the cost of housing? Does that not end up being prudential expenditure? In other words, in a situation where we are chronically short of workers, if we want to recruit people to build the infrastructure that everybody agrees has to be built - the housing that has to be built and the other infrastructural stuff that has to be done - the only way to square the circle is to pay workers more. However, that then brings you into current expenditure increases. Will the witnesses comment on that? It seems to me that these increases follow inevitably.