Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)
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I thank all the witnesses. Their contributions have been fascinating. I am not sure what my questions are because I have to absorb so much of what has been said.

It is interesting what the ESRI and Social Justice Ireland said, that when you take out the one-off measures it is a regressive budget. I agree. That is an important point for us to make.

My questions revolve around the latter discussion concerning the way forward. What do we do with the windfall revenues we have? Then there is the issue of moving away from reliance on FDI. The two are connected: we have all these windfall revenues and they are largely from corporate tax receipts, which may disappear at some point. There is a dilemma. We need to invest in long-term things, as Professor Kinsella suggests. We have to invest in housing; that is self-evident. We have not got enough housing. We have to invest in public transport; that is pretty self-evident. We have to invest in renewable energy, as well as in retrofitting homes and making them more energy efficient, insulation and all that kind of stuff.

I would argue something that is not talked about enough and that is potentially revenue-generating is the need to invest in a sustainable model of forestry. That is also related to biodiversity. Something that is absolutely not talked about enough is that we should invest a hell of a lot more in arts. If we are talking something at which we could and do excel at a world level, the arts are always forgotten.

I am thinking about how the world is dominated these days by film streaming, gaming and all sorts of creative industries, which are becoming ever more important, yet we put pathetic amounts of money into th arts, even though we are generally held to excel in areas like literature, theatre, music and so on. We have very low levels of investment there. Those are just a few thoughts. I forgot to mention the health service. In a lot of these areas, in order to do the things that we need to do, we have real shortages in skilled people to do the work. Many of those things require engineers, architects, construction workers and so on. Skill shortages are appearing all over the place. Increasingly, there are signs that young people who are qualifying in these areas are now leaving the country. We are in a sort of vicious circle. We need the people who come out of college and qualify as apprentices to do the long-term work to strategically reorientate the economy, but those people are leaving because we have not done those things. I wonder if the witnesses have any thoughts on those dilemmas. We are in a bit of a catch-22 situation.

Certainly, it is not the only thing. Housing and the cost of accommodation are probably the biggest issues that will be cited by people working in the health service who are thinking of leaving or have actually left. At least in some cases, we have to increase current expenditure to keep them here, or in education itself. I think we should get rid of all financial barriers to education because it makes sense for us that people get qualified. Why are we charging people fees and making it difficult for them to be graduates and postgraduates by charging them excessive amounts of money, or even not paying them to study? We need them. For example, I meet regularly with psychologists. Many young people studying psychology now go to the Netherlands because students do not pay fees there, accommodation is cheap and students are basically financially looked after when they are studying. In Scotland, they pay people who are training as nurses £10,000 a year to do it. Here, we make them work for free on placements. I would be interested in hearing the thoughts of the witnesses on that vicious circle and catch-22 dilemma on the need to have a long-term strategic focus, to reconfigure the economy and reduce our dependence on a potentially precarious FDI sector, but also the need to do things now to hold the young people here, the human resource that we have and that is necessary to do all those things.

My last question is on the nationalisation issue. Is what Professor Kinsella is saying an argument for a sort of State-driven industrial policy? I used the example of film. We put a lot of money into the film industry. We have been looking at the tax credit. However, we do not have any major companies of scale in film production in this country. Should we be doing that to build up an industry? Should the State sponsor certain strategic industries in a big way rather than just hoping the market is going to do it for us? Those are my questions.