Dr. Robert Sweeney:

On the question of why we are not more ambitious, TASC, the Think-tank for Action on Social Change, decided to focus on areas which we have been researching over the past year, namely, childcare and social housing, as well as health. For that reason, I did not advocate other revenue-raising mechanisms such as raising employer’s PRSI because that is typically not used to fund social housing. There are many ways to raise revenues to fund social programmes. We decided to advocate the things we did because they are pretty uncontroversial. On the issue of pensions, as Dr. Cohen mentioned, most of the subsidies go to the already better-off. The ESRI analysis showed it would raise around €1 billion. Similarly, on the top rate of income tax at 43%, those figures come from Revenue. There are obviously many ways one can do this but one has to deal with the political realities in place, as well as the appetite for them among the public.

It is true that income tax rates were much higher in the past. One also has to look at what other countries are doing. Ireland cannot go it alone in terms of increasing revenue. One has to be cognisant of those two off-setting matters.