Dr. Seán Healy:

I thought that one might have gone to each of us.

It needs to be recognised that poor people who do not pay income tax actually pay close to one third of their total incomes in tax. Much of the time, this is not recognised by anyone except the people themselves. They get a great deal of abuse for being "freeloaders" even though they pay VAT, levies and so forth.

Taking people out of the tax net and lowering what they pay in tax have little value to people on low-to-middle incomes if services and infrastructure do not replace, and more than replace, the money that has been taken away. There is a balance to be found between the money that people are contributing to society in tax and the investment in services delivered for same. Ireland's problem is that our infrastructure and services are far below the European average and our tax take is commensurate with that, and if we want to give people an advantage, we reduce taxes further instead of increasing infrastructure, for example, broadband and social housing, or improving services, be they health, education or something else.

The tax take should rise over time towards the European average - it does not necessarily need to reach it - principally through broadening the tax base. That money should then be used for investing in better services and so on. In this way, low-income people would pay a little bit of income tax, but their infrastructure - social housing, broadband and public transport - and health and education services would be much improved.

We are suggesting that this be done via five budget priorities, although one is governance, which might not cost much. The Government needs to consider the idea of a vibrant economy. There should be adequate investment in programmes that we have identified as needing it. Social housing and rural broadband are the two obvious ones. Their development would be good for the economy, the individual and society in many ways. We have thoughts on many other programmes, but those are just two.

We have gone on and on about decent services and infrastructure this afternoon, but it is important that they be improved. For this reason, we would invest in broadband and social housing. We would also invest in health, education and welfare. Welfare rates-----