Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)
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The mantra has been that we cannot fully protect people from the impact. It is not just those on the very lowest income but also the average working family who are dealing with higher costs at every level. They have been hammered, whether it is with energy costs, groceries, mortgage interest or rent. There are loads of different estimates on this but in real terms, low- and middle-income people are worse off even with the measures that have been introduced.

My point is that there is a group of people at the top who are not worse off. Surely the right and fair thing to do is to ensure that we fully protect those at the bottom who are on the lower incomes and who can least afford to be less well-off, by looking at the increased wealth of those at the top. Is it not time to do that, faced with this unprecedented cost-of-living crisis?

My point is that to do so would not be inflationary. The Minister says that if wealthy people have more money that is not necessarily inflationary because they might put it in the bank and save it. The bank they give the money to is then going to lend it to people and, by and large, it will lend it to people who they consider a good bet. In other words, they tend to lend it to people with more money, often to do things like speculate on how they can make more money, perhaps to buy a few rental properties or to invest in a real estate investment trust, REIT, or buy a yacht. That is the sort of expenditure we could do less of, in order to fully protect the people at the bottom who are really losing out and who can least afford to lose out.

I do not buy the argument that we cannot fully protect the low- and middle-income section of Irish society. It is always the working people and the poor who end up paying the price when it is very obvious when we look at the level of corporate profit and the concentration of net household wealth rising and overwhelmingly concentrated in the hands of a small group, that what we are actually seeing with the cost-of-living crisis is a redistribution of wealth from the less well-off to the wealthy and to very profitable corporations. Is that not a fair assessment of what is going on?