Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, Socialist Party) | Oireachtas source

What we have from the Government are some pre-election crumbs. They are not even crumbs from the Government’s own cake but crumbs from the people’s cake that the Government has taken from them in the form of the property tax. Even then, it is giving tiny crumbs of it back to them. I can see the leaflets now from Fine Gael in particular but also from the Labour Party, which is completely hypocritical considering the points Deputy Tóibín made about the arguments Labour Party councillors have made on local councils. They will target areas with higher property values explaining that Fine Gael and Labour have managed to stave off the revaluation of people’s homes, saving them a certain sum of money. I do not think people will buy that because they are not stupid. They know the Government - Fine Gael and Labour - introduced the property tax in the first place and so while they say they are saving people from yet more attacks, they did introduce this austerity tax.

On the issue of property tax, the Government is in danger of making a bad mistake of mistaking forced payment and forced compliance with the property tax with the idea of the acceptance of it. They are not the same thing. There continues to be an absolute hatred of the property tax. It is seen for what it is, which is not this talk of broadening the tax base when in reality, it hits ordinary people with yet another unfair, indirect and regressive tax. For PAYE workers and self-employed people, it comes out of the same pay packet. It is just another way of hitting them and, fundamentally, it was and is a bailout tax.

People see it for what it is and they feel increased resentment that was reflected in the opposition to the water charges precisely because of the forced compliance. The Government definitely patted itself on the back for breaking the campaign of non-payment and the boycott of the property tax. There was a very successful majority boycott of the household tax and then the Government quite deliberately handed that over to Revenue in the form of the property tax and gave it extremely draconian powers to force payment. The reality is that through doing so, it broke non-payment and forced people to pay either through stealing directly from their wages or forcing them to pay in anticipation that their wages would be robbed. People like me were forced to pay because they wanted to move homes or in my case, wanted to fulfil an election commitment I made to move into my constituency. It does not lessen my opposition and that of the Anti-Austerity Alliance or the people to the property tax. In fact, it has increased people's resentment of this tax because they feel it is fundamentally unjust. It, together with the supposed recovery that people did not see when they looked around and the nature of water as a vital resource for people, is a key reason why the anger and the movement were so great on the issue of water charges. This was an issue where people knew they could fight and mobilise in massive numbers. It is a year and a day since we had 60,000 to 70,000 people outside the Dáil. In particular, the fact that Revenue would not be involved in the case of water charges, draconian powers would not exist and people would be able to boycott successfully gave impetus to what became a massive majority boycott of the water charges.

The Government has itself to thank for that in terms of the property tax it pushed through and the way it robbed the property tax from people. A total of 57% of people boycotted the first bill while 52% boycotted the second bill. I received information on foot of a Freedom of Information request to Irish Water that sought to get accurate payment figures. These people do not understand the word "information". It is a case of freedom of obfuscation from the point of view of Irish Water, which deliberately avoids answering the questions again and again to avoid giving the real figures because they are so damning from its perspective and that of the Government. It comes back to the opposition built up over all the austerity attacks and taxes imposed by the Government.

A left-wing Government is needed. We need to clear out the establishment parties. We need a Government that excludes Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and Labour, that implements genuine anti-austerity policies and that puts people's needs at the heart of society rather than profit and the interests of the 1%. Some of the first actions of such a Government would be the abolition of water charges and Irish Water but also the abolition of the property tax. At that moment, if we have a left-wing Government or one that implements that policy, if there are Labour Deputies left in this House, I can imagine them screaming, as they do repeatedly whenever they are on any programme where they get an opportunity to talk about it, about how the property tax is really a wealth tax and that it is incredible that we have a Left in Ireland that is supposedly against a wealth tax - the only socialists in the world who are against a wealth tax. This is complete nonsense. A report issued by TASC a couple of days ago, entitled The Distribution of Wealth in Ireland, goes into figures relating to wealth distribution in some detail. These figures come from the CSO and Credit Suisse. There are many interesting facts in the report, one of which is that 70.5% of households own their own home. For people who own one home, it is really stretching things to describe that as wealth. It is a means of people achieving a basic human need and right, which is the need for shelter. It does not amount to wealth. It does not raise any money for them. It is simply the place where they live and it is entirely unjust to tax people's family homes.

The other fact revealed by the report is the extremely concentrated nature of wealth distribution in Ireland. The top 20% of the population own 72.7% of wealth, which is higher than the euro area average of 67.6%, while the bottom half of the population only owns around 5% of wealth. When one looks at the top 10%, the richer segment in our society, one can see that it owns most of the net wealth in Ireland at 53.8%. The top 5% own 37.7% while the top 1% owns 14.8%.

We should scrap these unjust austerity taxes and replace them with a real wealth tax. In terms of what would be raised by a real wealth tax, the Anti-Austerity Alliance has proposed a tax on net wealth in excess of €1 million. One can work that out from the Central Bank's quarterly bulletin figures, which give a figure of €601 billion for net household worth in the fourth quarter of 2014. Applying the distribution suggested by Credit Suisse to the Central Bank figures gives a total of €226.37 billion concentrated in the hands of 90,000 millionaire households who make up the richest 5%. If one allows a threshold of €1 million for each millionaire, it means €136 billion would be subject to a wealth tax and, therefore, €1.36 billion could be raised for each 1% in millionaire's tax. For example, a 2% emergency tax in 2016 could raise €2.7 billion. That is a wealth tax - a tax that primarily hits wealthy people's financial assets and other assets as opposed to people's primary single residence that does not amount to a wealth tax anywhere but in the heads of Labour Party propagandists who are trying to discredit the Left. The property tax should be abolished and we should introduce a real wealth tax.

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