Dr. Tom McDonnell:

Basically, to take them one by one, education, for example, is an area in which a social return drastically exceeds the personal return. It is what we call a merit good. We want people to buy into it so we should, if anything, be subsidising and paying people to go into education rather than having them pay for school books, registration fees for third level or whatever it might be. Lifelong education, of course, should be free for everyone.

Public transport is another one. We are supposedly trying our best to have a just transition. We are trying to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. We should be encouraging people to engage with public transport. Again, a public and social good outweighs the private good. It should, ideally, be free. Also, the cost of transport is a barrier to employment, as is the cost of childcare. To that extent, we can increase employment rates, particularly for second earners and lone parents in the case of childcare if, as we said, we were to make public transport and childcare completely free and decommodify them. There is, therefore, a strong case in all those areas for very high levels of subsidisation at the very minimum.

The Deputy also mentioned housing. NERI has proposed cost-rental housing, which would be organised through a new semi-State body. State-owned housing would, therefore, be available on a cost-rental basis where the income is recycled into the building of new housing. Over time, the State becomes a much larger player in the housing sector. There are all sorts of macroeconomic advantages associated with that to deal with the supply issue. Obviously, the housing crisis has many other factors associated with it. Land prices are a part of it. Taxation is certainly part of the solution in that regard.

We also talked about wages. Clearly, we have a low-pay problem in Ireland. We have a very skewed level of market inequality. We have many high-paid and low-paid workers. We have a low-pay problem that relates to the fact that we do not have a lot of manufacturing jobs, for example, and we have many bad-paying industries, such as accommodation, food services, restaurants, retail and things like that. Ideally, we want to move our economy away from those types of jobs over the longer term towards more high-value added jobs.