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

I move amendment No. 20:

In page 6, line 24, column 2, to delete “9 per cent” and substitute “15 per cent”.

The point of the amendment is shift the burden of cuts and adjustment onto those on higher salaries of over €100,000 per year. It was linked to amendments that sought to remove the Minister's intention to further cut the salaries of those under €100,000 per year. It was part of a package where instead of attacking those who earn less than €100,000 per year, the Minister would impose whatever cuts he is seeking on those earning over €100,000 because they can afford it. That is a principle many have articulated inside and outside of this House because they believe a Government that is interested in the welfare of ordinary working people, low and middle income families, should uphold that principle. It should protect those on low and middle incomes and impose the burden of adjustment on those who can afford it. I do not see why this Government resists such a way to deal with the adjustment it claims is necessary.

The advantage of this is that it means low and middle income workers, who have already been hammered with the universal social charge, cuts in their pay and levies, and who are at the edge of being able to manage, would not have to suffer further. It would also benefit the wider economy. As many on this side of the House have said to the Government, as the trade union movement has said time and again, and as many mainstream economists have said, if we take money out of the pockets of low and middle income earners, we adversely affect the wider economy. If we take it off those on higher earnings, because they can afford it, it will not have such a damaging effect on spending and, therefore, on the economy.

The Minister always resists that logic. I can understand Fine Gael doing that because traditionally it is a party that protects the well off and the super wealthy but it is astonishing that a Labour Minister and the Labour Party component of this Government resist this sort of alternative approach to dealing with the country's financial crisis. I do not see why the Minister would oppose such amendments or the principle that lies behind them.

Amendment No. 23 operates on the same principle, shifting the burden from those earning less than €100,000 to those earning more than €100,000.

It is connected to a wider set of alternative policies that have been articulated, not only by those in People Before Profit and United Left, but by the trade union movement itself. The trade union movement has stated we need to move in this alternative direction, and well the Minister knows it. If the Minister were on the other side of the House, as he was a few years ago, this is precisely the argument he would have been making and, indeed, Labour Deputies made it.

It is astonishing that sections of the trade union movement have signed up to what the Minister is proposing in this Bill because it runs counter to everything they have said for the past number of years when criticising austerity and talking about the economic damage that austerity is doing, both to the economy and to ordinary low and middle-income workers. They say that and then they recommend that their members accept what is clearly cruelly unjust and economically counterproductive.

These amendments point to the alternative. The Minister knows the alternative and I do not understand why the Labour Party is not supporting that alternative.

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