Dr. Se?n Healy:

It is a loaded question because it depends a lot on the issue and so on. If one is considering income distribution, there are 2 million tax units in the system. The committee understands what a tax unit is so I do not need to explain it. Of these, 1 million benefited from the income tax changes and 1 million did not. It was the better off 1 million tax units that benefited. It is a simple issue. These 1 million tax units are not just the top half of society; they include those earning €36,000 or wherever the ceiling was for the basic tax rate.

We must think in terms of grading or reducing as the income thresholds go up. As I said, while every household has been hit by the cost-of-living crisis, not all have been equally hit. Some people have the capacity to deal with it but a substantial number of people do not.

Sometimes I really struggle to deal with situations in which the people making the decisions do not seem to grasp the position of poor people, people depending on welfare and people on low pay and how difficult life has become for them. We described it in our budget analysis and critique as asking too much of the poor. I tried to give a sense of that in my introductory remarks. The sheer scale of what is expected to be covered is plain nuts. There is no way people can meet even the basic bills, given the increases in inflation, given what-----