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

I was vaguely amused to hear the former Minister, Deputy Burton, asking what Fine Gael will do now that it does not have the left-wing influence of the Labour Party to mitigate its right-wing neoliberal tendencies. The irony is that in its first few weeks in power without the Labour Party, Fine Gael has been forced to do left-wing things that the Labour Party was not willing to do in the last Government. In the first few weeks of this Government, Fine Gael has had to make certain changes in the face of massive pressure from a popular movement.

Having said those positive words, I want to move on to the more serious side of this debate. The broad thrust of the Government's economic statement is to laud itself for the increase in growth rates, the recovery in the economy and the increase in employment. I assume Deputy Burton was alluding to us when she suggested that certain people do not recognise that there is something of an economic recovery. It is not the case that we do not recognise it. We cannot dispute that significant growth rates are taking place again and that there has been a significant decrease in unemployment. However, the issue for us is whether that growth is sustainable in the long term. We want to make sure it is not the kind of growth we saw prior to 2008.

That sort of growth was lauded up until 2008 but then produced the biggest economic crisis in the history of the State. No one in the establishment predicted it would come crashing down, although the left did, but no one in the establishment, whether economists or politicians, saw it coming. The key question, therefore, is whether this is sustainable growth or the kind of growth that could lead us back to the disasters of 2008 and what followed.

Linked to this is the question of whether the growth is actually producing a real improvement in the living standards and quality of life of ordinary citizens. In other words, is the growth shared evenly? I would and will argue that this is not the case. The type of growth we are pursuing, and the strategy the Government is pursuing, is not sustainable and is recreating the dangers that led us into the last crash. The major beneficiaries of the economic growth are not ordinary people, who are not seeing it in their incomes and living standards, but the usual suspects, that is, vulture funds, landlords, banks and a very small and wealthy elite. They are doing very well. Profits are going through the roof. The banks that we bailed out are or will soon be back in profit. The vultures are making an absolute fortune. Landlords are creaming it at the moment. The rich are getting richer by every single measure.

On the other hand, as the UNITE report on pay in the economy concluded categorically, we are a low pay economy. It is clear that the period of the recession was used by those in Fine Gael and in Fianna Fáil who support the market-for-profit approach as an opportunity to further attack wages and conditions for ordinary workers. This is probably best summed up in the yellow pack entry rates for teachers that the Government tried to impose on nurses, although they have successfully resisted. However, we saw young teachers out on the streets the other day. Disgracefully and just because of their age, they are being asked to work for 10% less than those who just happened to come into teaching a few years before them, even though they have the exact same qualifications and do the exact same work. This is symptomatic of how those who subscribe to the neo-liberal, for profit, pro-market approach to economic management want to encourage a race to the bottom in terms of wages and conditions and see it as the basis of so-called economic growth. However, it is one that does not translate into better living standards.

This is most sharply expressed in the housing crisis. We have more people working but their earnings are so miserable that they cannot put a roof over their heads. Given the three years extra he or she will have to work, the lower entry rates and so on, the average public sector worker will earn during his or her lifetime approximately €300,000 less than someone recruited before the crash. That is the cost of a house. It is as simple as that. People entering the workforce on average earnings, who in a previous generation would have been able to afford a house, will not be able to afford a house. It is as simple as that, something which is sharply expressed in the current housing crisis.

The question is whether the Government strategy is designed or likely to deal with those contradictions, namely, the unsustainability of certain types of growth, the unequal sharing of the economic growth that does exist and the growing inequality between a small number of "haves" and a huge number of "have nots". This brings me to the issue of the fiscal space. It is tempting to paraphrase and slightly adapt the dictum that "there are lies, damn lies and statistics" to "there are lies, damn lies and the fiscal space". Even the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council has indicated that the Government is still playing around with figures or not being entirely honest on the issue of this so-called fiscal space given its refusal to factor in demographics and our growing population and how that eats up the fiscal space. It refuses to factor in property inflation, pay agreement commitments and so on after 2018. The €11 billion shrinks in reality to considerably less. There was some debate about how much less but even the council is saying it is very much less.

What this means for ordinary people, to translate the debate about fiscal space and how it is calculated into a language that ordinary people can understand, can be put like this. It is how a Government can say it is spending more than anyone else but it is actually spending less. It says that it is spending more on health than anyone else, but of course it is given demographic pressures and so on. However, proportionately, are we spending more or less on the services people need given the demands on those services? No matter how much the Government goes on about how it is spending and will spend more on health, in reality we see services being pulled in a whole range of areas, an ongoing crisis in our accident and emergency departments, waiting lists and so on. When one factors in the pressures of a rising population and rising demand, the cost of drugs and all the rest of it, in reality what the Government is proposing in terms of health expenditure simply will not deal with the level of prices we are facing.

Last night, we had an extensive discussion on all sides about how much we love the arts and how important and what a good investment they are. However, when we proposed an amendment to the motion providing that we would spend a bit more real money in the arts, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil refused to do it. They will not even raise, as suggested by us, the pathetic level of investment in arts from the current level of 0.1% to 0.2% next year. They will not even do that, which is absolutely shocking.

This brings me to the question of the fiscal rules, the Government's strict adherence to them and the madness and irrationality of that approach. In simple terms, the fiscal rules state that if a country's private banks go bust, the country has to borrow €64 billion to bail them out and the rest of society pays a cruel price. However, if we want to invest in health infrastructure, social housing that is desperately needed, the arts, education or even forestry, we are told we cannot do it. We are allowed invest in propping up private banks but we are not allowed invest in things that would make life better for people or, God forbid, give people a wage increase. That is out the window.

I apologise to Deputy Paul Murphy, but I will conclude on this point. The real issue that is absolutely missing in terms of a sustainable economic outlook and perspective is the question of wealth redistribution. That is simply not on the Government's agenda. It is the inequality in the distribution of wealth and the control of capital by a tiny number of banks and multinationals, which the Government keeps nurturing and point blank refuses to tax, that is at the heart of the economic instability at national, European and international levels. The Government is not willing to address that and staunchly protects the 1% and puts all the pain, caps and restrictions on the pay and conditions and of employment and the services of ordinary people.

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