Tommy Broughan (Dublin North East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I move: "That the Bill be now read a Second Time."

I thank the Deputies who are present this morning. I welcome the opportunity to discuss the High Pay and Wealth Commission Bill on Second Stage. The Bill provides for the establishment of a high pay and wealth commission on a permanent basis in the Central Statistics Office to carry out research on levels of pay and wealth in the State, to inform public policy in order to promote a fair income distribution across society, and to provide for related matters.

I also welcome the establishment of the Low Pay Commission, which I hope will be on a statutory basis as soon as possible. I also hope that the new Low Pay Commission will quickly move the national minimum wage of €8.65 an hour to a national living wage which is calculated at €11.45 an hour.

The genesis of the High Pay and Wealth Commission Bill before us lies in my efforts and those of other Opposition Deputies in the 31st Dáil, many of whom are here this morning, to develop progressive budgetary policies to end cutbacks and austerity. Last October, I made an independent submission on taxation and spending measures which would have delivered a progressive balanced budget but during the preparation of those policies, I again noted a dearth of information across widespread areas of higher income and wealth distribution in Ireland. While there is long-standing useful information on much of public sector and social protection incomes, there are huge gaps and unknowns in the information on earned income and levels of wealth in the Irish economy. The Bill seeks to remove this serious drawback for future framers of public policy.

Over the decades, valiant efforts have been made to remedy this information deficit. Brian Nolan's seminal work in 1991 for the Combat Poverty Agency entitled The Wealth of Irish Households was a benchmark study based on the ESRI's 1987 Survey of Income Distribution, Poverty and Usage of State Services. Mr. Nolan's work famously began, "little is known about the wealth of Irish households and the forms in which it is held" and made the critical observations that general surveys do not provide a reliable source on small subsets such as the top 1% of the population, and that the best-off households are less likely to respond to such surveys.

The key definitions under section 2 are of "high pay", which is defined as "gross income from employment or other sources in excess of €80,000", and "wealth" which is defined as "net wealth, which is the value of an individual's gross stock of assets after the deduction of all debts and liabilities". Since 1991 and up to very recently, the Irish public and policymakers have had to rely mainly on international studies and so-called rich lists to gain any insight into the levels of higher incomes and stocks of wealth. One such service is the Credit Suisse investment bank's annual global wealth reports, and the Credit Suisse 2014 report puts Ireland into a list of countries with medium wealth inequality. That means the richest 10% of households, or the top decile, owns more than 50% of the nation's wealth. According to Credit Suisse, Ireland's top decile of households owned 58.2% of national wealth in 2000, 57.8% of that wealth in 2007 and still has a staggering 58.8% of national wealth in 2014.

The Irish public is also familiar withThe Sunday Timesrich list and Forbesmagazine's "world's billionaires list", where 1,826 billionaires, worth $7.05 trillion are identified, and where most of the top 100 names have personal wealth greater than many countries' gross national product. A few weeks ago, the Sunday Independent''s Mr. Nick Webb produced that paper's Irish "rich list" for 2015, with 300 billionaires and millionaires named having total wealth of €84.4 billion, with a whopping increase in wealth of €13.65 billion over the past year. The top 20 has the usual super-rich personalities, including the Mistry family with €14.5 billion, Mr. Denis O'Brien with just under €6 billion-----

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