Mr. Jim Clarken:

We appreciate the opportunity to be with the committee today and to make a contribution on the committee's deliberations and work on this issue. I am also very pleased that my colleague, Simon Murtagh, is here and that Sheila Killian, a professor at the University of Limerick, has joined us as well. We may have Professor Ocampo, who is a former minister for finance of Colombia, who is a leading expert on the movement for progressive tax reform.

The invitation comes on the back of work that Oxfam is doing on inequality and the taxation implications. Before I get to that I will give a little bit of background as to who we are. Oxfam is a global movement of people seeking to end poverty and injustice. We speak out on the big issues that keep people poor, like inequality and discrimination against women. We are an independent all-island organisation. We are part of a global confederation working in 90 countries. Oxfam Ireland works across the island of Ireland. We have been here for more than 60 years, supported by people across all communities. We are an independent, secular and non-profit organisation. Our programme focus is in east, central and southern Africa but we respond to emergencies worldwide. We campaign on a wide range of issues that we believe keep people locked into poverty.

In the last decade or so we have honed in on the issue of inequality. We have identified that unless we can tackle inequality, we cannot tackle poverty. A focal point of that work has been our annual report, leading into the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. In recent years, these reports have tracked the rising rate of inequality, the extreme nature of it, and the fact that it continues to get deeper and wider. What we are talking about is a gilded age like in 19th century America, when staggering wealth existed alongside devastating poverty. In terms of that inequality in today's world, I refer to the single graph in the paper from the Davos report. The graph is taken from Forbes, which shows that billionaire wealth increased from $500 billion in 1987 to $14 trillion today, a 28 times increase. It is important to note that these figures are adjusted for inflation, so that is a real increase. This large glut of wealth is held by a very small minority. It is non-productive in many instances. It is just sitting there generating more money. It is not being put to economic use. It is often built from carbon-intensive industries and it is avoiding taxation and benefit to wider society. We talk about it as a possible billionaire problem. At the same time, our Survival of the Richest report, which is the one we produced this year, identifies that over the past two years an additional 140 million people have been driven into extreme poverty. Women and girls have suffered the most in terms of economic losses, low-paid work, being forced out of education and an additional spike in gender-based violence.

We wanted to be involved in the delivery of the sustainable development goals, SDGs, which had the ambition to eradicate extreme poverty by 2030, which is just around the corner. The extreme poverty line has a very low minimum threshold. People living above it are still very poor. That was the ambition for the SDGs, which Ireland was heavily involved in negotiating, but we are actually going backwards. More people are living in extreme poverty than had been for quite a long time.

Getting back to wealth; the pattern of wealth that we see across the world is similar in Ireland. We use a methodology in conjunction with the wealth consultancy, Wealth-X, that shows the elite wealth in Ireland falls into two categories: those with the equivalent net wealth of more than $5 million – it is based on US dollars, and those with net wealth of more than $50 million. Those two categories have doubled over the past decade. That is also adjusted for inflation. It shows that the extreme wealth that we see across the world is no different from what we are seeing here in Ireland. Wages are stagnating and wage increases are not keeping up with the cost of living, so working people are actually poorer than they were, while this group of people continues to accumulate additional wealth.

We believe in the principles of equity and sustainability at home as well as abroad. Therefore, in the recommendations for taxation and welfare, we sought to propose policies not just to face the demographic and environmental challenges we have talked about but also to do it in a progressive and socially just way. We looked at Social Justice Ireland's submission on housing, health, disability and carers, pensions and older people, children and families, and the just transition, as well as the cost of delivering on our commitment on overseas development aid, ODA. Members will know that we have a very long way to go to deliver on the commitments we made a number of times. We are nowhere near it. If we introduce a wealth tax, these are some of the things that could be delivered upon. We proposed some taxes for these groups of people. There are 20,575 people who have a net wealth in excess of $5 million net and 1,435 with a net wealth in excess of $50 million. With very modest taxation, we believe we could produce between €5 billion and €8 billion for the Exchequer. We put some suggestions in that regard. It is just illustrative. We are not being prescriptive on this. These are just thoughts that we have on how this could be done.

We agree with the Commission on Taxation and Welfare regarding the foundations for the future proposal that we can look to increase existing capital taxes and close loopholes and windows that exist. In addition, a wealth tax should be considered. Finding a way to increase taxes on those who have the most in society seems like a smart thing to do.

We propose starting a national conversation. We do not pretend to have all the answers but we believe the moment is right for this conversation. Ireland is in a temporary position where it has very large corporate tax levels and earnings but everybody knows that is not sustainable in the long term and will disappear as tax reforms happen throughout the world. We need to consider how to broaden the tax base and find ways to tax that elite group. Oxfam suggests that can be done by bringing a wide range of stakeholders together, perhaps using a citizens' assembly type of approach.

The recommendations in our Survival of the Richest report are non-prescriptive. There is a lot Ireland can do, not just within this country but where it participates in international spaces, on the concern we all have in respect of the opaqueness of money flows. There is a significant lack of transparency globally. Ireland can be part of a progressive system to transform that in areas such as the creation of a global asset registry and public registries of beneficial owners, which should include trusts. There are a range of new international taxes that Ireland could support, such as new forms of wealth, dividend, windfall and climate taxes and so on. Some of these will be discussed at the summit in Paris next week on a new financial pact. We hope the Taoiseach will attend that summit.

In addition, we need to come back to the wealth tax itself. There is an increasing narrative across a wide political, social and economic spectrum globally that this should be seriously considered. Even the World Economic Forum has stated that the accumulation of global wealth and the way it is being accumulated, with a lack of economic benefit to anybody apart from those few who hold it, suggests that we need to make that money work. One way to do that would be to tax.

We launched today a European citizens initiative on wealth tax. It seeks to raise 1 million signatures in favour of an EU-wide wealth tax and is being supported by a range of European economists, including Thomas Piketty.

That is a quick snapshot of where we are coming from with this. The time is right. It is right across the globe. Other countries have been seriously considering how this could work and some of them are already initiating it. If we do not get a handle on extreme wealth and inequality, we will struggle to reach goals here in Ireland, as well as for the poorest people in the world. The time is right. I hope that will be of interest to the committee.