Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 28 November 2023

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Climate Action

COP28: Discussion

Mr. Simon Murtagh:

I am just clarifying. Another point to make on the question of consumption and production emissions is that our report is only about consumption, and in a way the focus on luxury goods, huge holiday homes and private jets is a bit of a distraction in the sense that the richest people in society hold their wealth in financial assets, as we know, and those financial assets are not counted in the inequality statistics in this report, so the figure would really be much higher. We know that 1% of people in this country control more than 25% of all the wealth, that is, more than one quarter of the €1 trillion of our overall wealth-----