Mr. Conor O'Neill:

I wish we had more time in this committee because to us, tax is where the action is. Almost everything that we talk about, whether it is the kind of core development work of poverty reduction or investing in equitable climate action, the question always arises - as it ought to - as to how we pay for it. Part of the reason we are trying to be propositional on that, and not overly prescriptive because there are a number of options here, is to try to shift the burden away from just a solely national budgetary process to think about how capital moves around the world, and particularly through the European Union.

In terms of the barriers and what could be useful there, one of the most encouraging things to take from a really dark period from the height of the Covid pandemic, and from the response to the massive inflation in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, is that political shocks like that can help to drive economic policy ideas, which for a very long time have been seen as fringe or marginal, right back to the centre of international thinking. Some of those are laid out, but as an example, the idea of a tax on excess corporate profits has been talked about in the tax justice movement for a very long time.

There was resistance even to the idea of an idea that corporate tax could be broken up into what is so-called normal and what is excess. If you fast forward then, the data from KPMG show that, since the beginning of last year, a tax on the excess profits of certain corporate actors has been either passed into law or advanced in basically every single EU country, making more than 30 in total. Many of them started like we did in Ireland, which we really welcomed, on something that is narrow and focused solely on energy companies but in the last number of months have actually expanded to talk about other sectors, particularly financial institutions. That is the kind of change that needs to happen on the climate. There does not seem to be that same urgency to treat this as an emergency. When the Covid-19 pandemic happened, every single available resource was marshalled. The cost of our response to Covid-19 was massive but we appreciated, in the emergency, that the cost of inaction and of not doing it - not only in the monetary sense but in people's lives - would have been much greater. If one of the things that comes out of this committee is a re-engagement with the Joint Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach, and an acknowledgement that we will not deal with this properly without talking about those big issues, particularly corporate tax, it would be a big success. We would be very happy to come back and discuss the link between climate and economic justice in more detail with members.