Dr. Seán Healy:

Reducing the gap between rich and poor should always be a focus or a priority in budgets.

It is not always the case. For years we have been doing analysis of budgets. On page 4 of our budget choices document we have supplied to the committee today, we provide a worked out impact assessment of the last three budgets and the distribution of the gains. It is quite clear that the people who have gained least are single unemployed people and those on lowest earnings. There is obviously a serious problem. There are two things that need to be constantly kept in focus, the first of which is that the payments of the people depending on welfare should be index linked so that they do not lose out. We show how that can be done on page 4. If we were to bring it to 27.5% of average incomes, which is where it should be benchmarked, we would need an increase in the coming budget of €9 per week for a single person. The second focus is the working poor, the more than 100,000 people who are in jobs but still live in poverty. We must consider the most targeted way of getting to them and ensuring that gap is reduced to give income tax credits and to make the two main tax credits refundable. Both of those things could be done and we have shown how in our document.

There is one other point on foreign direct investment that Mr. Murphy will deal with.