Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)

The centrepiece of the Bill is the pension levy. It is outrageous and economically stupid that we should attack the pensions savings of 750,000 workers and 65,000 pensioners, who are already struggling under the impact of the current crisis, and that this attack should take place to fund a jobs initiative that will do next to nothing to deal with the unemployment crisis and may significantly worsen it.

Like their Fianna Fáil predecessors, there is no low to which the Government will not sink to protect bankers and bondholders who caused the crisis and to protect the super-wealthy in our society. I would like to have asked the following questions of the other Minister at the Department of Finance, Deputy Howlin, but I will ask the Minister for Finance. Why is it okay to attack pensioners and the pensions savings of ordinary working people but not to repudiate the debts of bankers and bondholders? Why will the EU-IMF allow one but insist the other is not on the agenda? Why is it not okay to impose wealth taxes on multimillionaires and billionaires or to put higher taxes on people who earn more than €100,000 per year, which is more than enough to live and survive on? Why is it okay that approved retirement funds, one of which Seánie Fitzpatrick, for example, has, will not be touched by these measures? It is extraordinary and outrageous that this Finance Bill will, yet again, attack the poor to protect the rich and those who caused the current economic crisis. Why will the Government not take something from the super-wealthy, bankers and bondholders? Why does it insist on hitting the poor, working people and pensioners again and again?

This theft of pensioners and ordinary workers is being carried out to fund a jobs initiative that is a joke. The amount of money the Government is putting into roads, schools and retrofit is pathetic. Roads will probably receive less than was just spent on the Obama and Queen Elizabeth visits. Is that not just appalling, even if we cannot get a straight answer on how much those visits cost? Is it not sickening to think the new investment programme in schools under this jobs initiative may be less than we have just spent on the jamboree that has taken place in this country over the past week?

The reductions in PRSI are not contained in this Bill but are part of the same jobs initiative. They apply to employers who employ workers earning €356 or less, which is essentially an incentive, probably a deliberate one, to create a low wage economy and to pin down wages further and depress demand, which will accelerate the downward spiral in the economy.

With regard to the focus on tourism in the Bill, while of course all of us would welcome measures that boost the tourism sector, the Minister should examine the experience of IMF intervention elsewhere, particularly in the developing world, where it has imposed structural adjustment like that it is imposing on us, adjustment that has devastated the indigenous economy and impoverished the local people. What is left for those people when the IMF does that? Tourism is what is left. Impoverished, immiserated people are left begging for the tourist dollar, which seems to be the direction we are heading. The IMF-EU package will cripple our economy and all that will be left is to beg for the tourist dollar. When one cannot walk around a corner in Dublin without seeing somebody begging for the tourist dollar, one might get some sort of vision of where the Government's current economic strategy for the whole country is going. Of course, all of these paltry, pathetic and in some cases counterproductive measures also take place against a background of the slow, or not so slow, attrition of jobs as a result of the public sector recruitment embargo, which is throwing more of a burden onto our social welfare system, week in, week out, month in, month out, as more jobs are lost.

There is an alternative. The Minister often challenges those on this side of the House, telling us we are all very good at criticism but asking what is our alternative. There is an alternative and it is implicit in what I have said. Why do we not introduce a 5% emergency wealth tax, even on a short-term basis, on the assets over €1 million, excluding the family home, of the super-wealthy in our society? There are wealth taxes in France and in other countries in Europe. Given the hit everyone else is taking, including ordinary workers and pensioners, why can we not impose a wealth tax on the super-wealthy in this country who, we have discovered yet again in the past few weeks with the publication of the latest rich list, are even richer than they were before? Why can we not also establish new higher taxes on people earning over €100,000 a year? If we did that, we could marshal considerably more resources than will be marshalled from this pathetic Bill to invest in a real jobs programme.

What a real jobs programme would involve is as follows. There would be big investments in public works programmes to develop vital infrastructure such as a water system, schools, hospitals, local amenities and public services. It would involve public investment in strategic industries in areas such as wind, wave and tidal power, generic medicines, IT, recycling and more traditional industries and developing the food sector - we could develop all sorts of areas. It would involve not selling our State assets or our natural resources and developing these for employment and other economic and social goals. It would involve a massive curtailment of the costly and completely inefficient outsourcing practices and use of consultants by local authorities and the State, moving instead to the more efficient and employment-beneficial direct employment of people in those programmes.

Finally, will the Minister consider introducing differential rates for small and medium businesses so the big, profitable companies pay more in rates and so small, struggling businesses get a break in regard to rates, which might help deal with the apocalypse that small businesses in this country are facing?

See this speech in context