Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)
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I thank the witnesses from TASC and Social Justice Ireland for their contributions and their good work. I agree completely on the revenue-raising exercises they are talking about. It might be worth elaborating on the logic of how they came to their proposals. It is not talked about much by the Government or the main Opposition party or even some of the think tanks. They talk about prudence, sticking to the rules and not overheating the economy. What is completely left out of the debate most of the time is the need for and viability of increasing the fiscal space through raising extra taxes on sectors that could actually afford it. That could involve the tax reliefs and expenditures currently going to big business and the very wealthy or the fact that higher incomes could be taxed more without taxing those people out of existence. It is great that the witnesses raised those points. Do they not think that we could be a bit more ambitious in that regard?

We need a lot of money to go into public housing. Dr. Healy is right to say that. The list is 144,000 if we include people on housing assistance payment, HAP, and rental accommodation scheme, RAS, transfer lists. If we do not have a housing programme that aims to get close to building that amount of housing, we are not going to solve the problem. Should we not be more ambitious in our revenue-raising efforts? Why stick at 6% for the minimum effective corporate tax rate? Our current rate of 12.5% is low by international standards and, as we all know, nowhere near that is actually paid. It is currently more like 2% or 4%, so why only go to 6%? Why not set a minimum effective rate at 12.5%? Fianna Fáil will definitely scoff at that.

On the higher incomes, we should have one band over €120,000 according to TASC's proposal. Why not more? I honestly ask if anybody really needs an income of €200,000 to €500,000. To my mind, we should have a much more steeply progressive tax system. There was a time, going back to the 1950s and 1960s, when very high incomes had punitive tax. I think a Labour politician once said he would tax them until the pips squeak. Why not be more ambitious in that regard? Have the witnesses any comment on financial transaction taxes? It is a big area in which I think we could raise extra revenue.

On housing, there is quite a bit of debate on what the hold-up is at the moment. I would say it is that on public land, the Government is in insisting on a mixture of social and affordable housing yet it refuses to define affordable housing, which means no schemes can get going because nobody knows the official position on affordability. That thinking is based on the idea that we have got to have mixed tenures but now it is becoming a reason for nothing happening. I believe there is a stigma attached to building public, social housing. That has been the excuse for the various public private partnerships, PPPs, selling off bits of public land, mixed tenure and all that.