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

I am very curious to know what exactly this committee is doing in the area of inequality, with which it is tasked to deal. It seems to me, particularly given recent events such as the election of Mr. Trump in the US and what many people are calling the rise of extreme populism, that the question of tackling inequality is central to addressing inequality. The political establishment, in all its wailing, hand-wringing and gnashing of teeth, laments what it calls the rise of the extremes at the expense of what I think the Minister, Deputy Coveney, called the sensible centre. The political establishment should recognise that the lesson of what has happened in the United States and much of Europe with the rise of the extreme right is that it is a response precisely to the extremities of inequality that are growing across the globe, which are the responsibility of the so-called sensible centre. It has been under the sensible centre, so-called, that the extremes of inequality that are destabilising our society have grown. I put it to the Taoiseach that there is a remarkable and alarming symmetry between the levels of inequality that form the backdrop to the rise of Mr. Trump and those that exist in this country. That is the real lesson, if we are to take seriously the danger that Mr. Trump and his like represent and if we do not want to see a repeat of it in this country. The levels of inequality in this country have grown shockingly under the Government's watch and under the watch of the Labour Party previously. The number of children suffering deprivation has doubled, we have one of the highest proportion of people working on low pay almost anywhere in the OECD - we are in second place - and the gap between the rich and poor has grown exponentially. All of these factors are witnessed in the United States as well.

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