Bernard Durkan (Kildare North, Fine Gael)
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I welcome our guests and thank them for their input. A couple of issues come to mind. The issues requiring attention at this stage, which have already been mentioned, are housing and health. Education needs to be noted as an area for further investment. There are bottlenecks arising there that need to be dealt with. The other thing that is necessary nowadays is to look at where we spend our money and when we can expect a return. This relates to infrastructure and whatever else. When is the return from it likely to be? In some cases, we have always needed long-term investment. That is fine. As regards the building of houses right now, I am not suggesting we should stop retrofitting because while it is helpful, it is also expensive. There needs to be building of affordable houses in a way that makes them readily available to the people who are either facing homelessness or are in danger of being priced out of the market. Well, they are priced out of the market. The emphasis should be on providing homes for people who need the homes. We should not allow financial institutions or funds to move in, purchase the properties and rent them back to the people who are caught in a trap and forced to rent at extraordinarily high rents. I find it difficult to believe that nobody has mentioned this. The rents are just extraordinary. They are extortionate. I am not suggesting that people go out to do that. The fact of life is simply that construction funds are borrowed at a high rate of interest and put to use and the finished product is put back on the market, to be purchased, in many cases, by the same venture or vulture funds. We have countless cases of this at the moment. People have rented houses in the open market for up to 25 years and now the landlords want to sell the properties or want family members to take over or whatever the case may be. The renters, having paid the landlord or investor's rent for 25 years, now have to start again and are almost too old to get a loan. The local authorities are not in a position to award them a house because their income is too high. They are forced to pay a high rent on the open market. These people's problems need to be addressed in a meaningful way and it needs to be done soon. It is not something we can wait for. I have listened to the advice that we have to build more houses, but we need to know who we are building them for. We need to ensure that, when built, such houses are available in an even-handed way to people who need the houses for themselves, not to rent on to somebody else. That is increasing in importance.

I do not want to go on too long about this but I could go on for ages. I remember all of the advice we got when the financial crash came. There were countless economists, soothsayers and everybody else advising the Government of the time to do something different.

They also stated that it was going the wrong way. Those people were wrong. I hate to say this to an economist, and I apologise to our economists for saying that in passing. The fact is, however, that we need to look carefully at the moves we make now. Increases in taxation cause inflation too because the people whose taxes are increased have to find money somewhere else. The theory in some quarters is that they have enough money anyway.

I ask people to pause for an instant. If we look at the persons who earn €50,000 or thereabouts, they do not think they are in a bed of roses. They are right because they are heavily taxed, and their tax is increasing. Their contribution to taxation is high. In the same way that people who are dependent on social welfare need to be well treated in any budget now and in the future, we must think about those who are at work and who are paying to such an extent that it is a burden on them. They will tell you this regularly. We need to dampen our views in that regard with a view to ensuring that people in that income bracket are recognised and catered for.

Another issue is that of inheritance tax, which has been mentioned already, and capital acquisitions tax. Let us take inheritance tax first. Everybody seems to have forgotten that house prices have increased to an extraordinary degree. Sons and daughters are inheriting from parents who paid tax, and high tax in most cases, on what has now become the subject of inheritance tax. Taxes have already been paid. The theory that the people who are calling for a reduction in inheritance tax or a change in bands or thresholds are all wrong and should not get any relief is not correct. They strove to provide that asset, and they did provide it. They did not do it painlessly. They did it through sheer hard graft in very difficult circumstances over a period of 30 to 40 years prior to the issue of inheritance arising. We need to bear that in mind and stop the fanciful thinking about how much we can penalise people who are going to inherit. Incidentally, as a result of increases in property prices, people are in the lower income bracket and the houses they are due to inherit are coming into scope for such tax. In order words, those responsible want to penalise these people more.

There has been discussion in the House regarding the Apple tax case, etc. Reference was made to windfall taxes and the degree to which we are dependent on foreign direct investment. We need to be careful not to create a situation whereby an antipathy develops towards foreign direct investment or whereby we dissuade foreign companies investing here. There is no need to dissuade anybody. For reasons best known to it, the European Court of Justice decided that we had treated foreign direct investors in the wrong way and that there was a sweetheart deal in place. I do not know that there was a sweetheart deal. We have discussed this many times in the past. What I do know is that we live in a very competitive society globally. We find ourselves being criticised almost on a daily basis for allegedly having sweetheart deals with certain companies. We can dissuade people from coming here. If that is what we want, by all means we should do that. Remember, however, that there will be consequences. The consequences will come fairly quickly, and we know that from what happened in the past.

We have to take into account the advice that we should refrain from inflating the economy as much as possible. Any move we make that creates inflation within the economy is not to anybody's advantage. We should be very careful in this regard. If you talk to people in the catering and entertainment trade about the domestic economy, you will discover that many are in difficulty. Restaurants and cafés are closing down. That may well be for a multiplicity of reasons. We need to examine carefully what are the input costs that are causing the problem. A complaint we hear regularly is that increases in the minimum wage do not necessarily impact only on the minimum wage, they affect all wages. There are knock-on effects. We need to look at individual cases and examine carefully the contributory inflation factors that exist in the domestic economy. We need to do that now.

Rent costs in the commercial sector are definitely a factor. Businesses will close down if they cannot afford to operate. I could recount lots of stories about that matter but I will no do so now.