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

I am not sure whether my colleagues are coming in to share the time but if they do I will share it. We do not oppose the legislation. I welcome the fact that apparently, some lessons were at least partially learned from the follies of the response of the European Union, its member states and here in Ireland to the crisis in 2008 and the austerity that followed it. We need not return to austerity but instead to inject money into maintaining jobs, investing in services and adopting Keynesian policies rather than fiscal austerity policies. This is to be welcomed.

The two specific mechanisms or schemes we are talking about include the EU's SURE scheme, focused on supporting schemes to keep people in work, which is absolutely right and it is absolutely critical that we do so. I understand there is also some expenditure on occupational health and the pan-European guarantee fund to support and finance small and medium enterprises primarily, although notably it also refers to middle and large scale companies. This may be justified but I will make a few points about how we do have to distinguish in our supports between the small enterprises that really need the help and big enterprises. We should not subsidise highly profitable entities and they should have to pay us back. We need to distinguish between those that are very small and facing an existential threat to their survival, which should not have strings attached to that support and should get all of the support we can give to sustain their existence through this difficult period, and large companies and corporations that can often benefit from these schemes but do not need them and perhaps do not recognise their obligations to everybody else in terms of paying back that support. In this regard, I cannot help but comment on the day that is in it.

Much of this is still about borrowing money. I support borrowing money and injecting it into the economy. Interest rates are low and the various schemes are about giving low interest finance to states and to business, to schemes to keep people in work or, indeed, as the Government is also intending to do, to just borrow on the markets.

However, we should put some provisos on the debt financing of stimulus. I cannot help commenting on the irony of where we are. It is not so long ago that the same EU and the Governments that included the two major parties in this country, who are now promoting this more Keynesian approach, were telling us that we had to stay with a fiscal austerity model, that one could not debt finance one's way out of a crisis, it was dangerous to do it and that it would produce an unsustainable debt burden and put us in a very vulnerable position. Now it appears all that caution and prudence have gone out the window and it is a case of borrow, borrow, borrow. Members should not misunderstand me. I disagreed with the fiscal austerity model when it was proposed and some of us warned that the time was not far away when people would realise the folly of the fiscal treaty and that it would be necessary to borrow and break through the fiscal treaty parameters to deal with an economic crisis such as the one we faced. Here we are, and suddenly all the rules can be broken. It is difficult not to comment on the irony of that.

However, here we are and lessons seem to have been learned. Ironically, I now find myself in the "let us be a little prudent" camp. Debt financing cannot go on forever. One eventually has to pay the piper. Somebody is always making money when one borrows money. It is rich people who are making money. It is the people with inherited wealth and the vast accumulations of profit, and who are looking for somewhere to sustain and increase the value of that, who are lending us the money and want to be repaid. There is an alternative to that, and the €18 billion that the EU will decide on tomorrow brings that into sharp relief. We would not need to borrow the vast amounts of money we are about to borrow, or are in the process of borrowing, if we took the €13 billion plus interest from Apple. We would not incur this debt burden and all the interest.

It is worth saying that because it is those accumulations of wealth and capital that we are borrowing from at interest. It might not be Apple directly but wherever it puts its money, such as some wealth asset management outfit which lends it to governments such as ours or to the European Union and is then paid interest on it. It is constantly accumulating its wealth. We could, and I believe we should, short-circuit that process somewhat by just taking back the tax money it owes us. We would not have to borrow so much, and it would transform our situation. It is important to say that, particularly because the Government, after tomorrow, is very likely to be faced with a decision on whether it will appeal that judgment. One cannot separate the considerations the Government has in that regard and the discussion we are having now because it has a direct bearing in terms of how much we have to borrow. I say we should borrow less and make the big corporations pay their fair share of taxes. We could still fund the stimulus that we absolutely must have.

The other thing I wish to say, and there is some acknowledgement of it in these two schemes, is something we must write large. Much of the talk on stimulus, understandably and correctly, is focused on private business, SMEs and so forth. I agree with that. They are on the floor, they need help and they should get that support, so Members should not misunderstand what I am saying. However, there appears to be a complete failure most of the time to acknowledge that the public sector is part of the plan to get us out of this crisis, or it should be. Investment in that area is critical. Often the two are set against each other. At the most obvious level, we must recognise that this is true. What we learned during Covid-19 is that if our health service is not able to cope or is even threatened with the situation of not being able to cope with the health needs of our society, the entire economy, or most of it, shuts down. That is not an equation that most people would have accepted up to now. There was the attitude that too much money was going into the public sector and that what we needed to do was support the entrepreneur, as if the two were at odds with each other. What we have learned, and I hope we never forget it, is that the private sector effectively shuts down if our health service is not able to cope. We had better learn the lesson going forward - God, I hate that expression - because this could have an immediate impact on everything we are discussing here. All the stimulus in the world of small enterprise will be meaningless if our health service is overrun in the autumn because of a second wave and the economy has to be shut down again. It will all be pointless, and this discussion will be rendered meaningless.

What we know, as we learned from repeated testimony at the Special Committee on Covid-19 Response, and what I hope we do not forget in the rush and understandable desperation to get the economy back up and running, is that our public health service is running at such critically low levels of capacity that it would not take much for that system to be overrun. You will be aware of the famous graph, a Cheann Comhairle. We have to raise the capacity part of that graph very significantly. It is not just about the level of infection, but the level of infection related to the capacity of the health service to deal with it. Critically in that regard, while some of it is capital capacity, such as building the physical infrastructure and having the ventilators, most of it is staff. We must urgently recruit staff to the health service to increase ICU and bed capacity, to put staff capacity levels into the nursing home sector, recruit general practitioners and so forth to provide the cradle to the grave healthcare that is able to cope with the type of situation we are in at present. If we not do that as a matter of urgency, all this stimulus will be irrelevant if there is a second wave.

In that focus on the role of the public sector in sustaining the wider economy, one could make the same point about education. If we have to shut down the schools and the universities again, all of this will be irrelevant. If childcare has to shut down again, this will be irrelevant because people will be at home minding the children and unable to get out to work. What if we have to shut down public transport? As the Government and, indeed, the EU are considering what they are going to do with these funds, they must understand that a huge part of the stimulus programme must be a massive increase in investment in the capacity of key public services and infrastructure to deal with the crises we are facing now and in the foreseeable future. I sincerely hope that lesson is learned.

8 o’clock

It is critically important we channel these supports towards the people who have fallen through the cracks. This was put very well by the Event Production Industry Covid-19 Working Group, EPIC, the events people who organise gigs, the music industry and so on, when it appeared before the Covid committee and by the representatives of the arts sector. I refer to the individual sole trader, the musician, the small business with a van but no premises and which is not rateable and so on. They are not getting the supports and have in some cases been excluded from them. The supports need to be directed at them because they are in serious trouble. Taxi drivers cannot avail of any of the SME supports because they do not have rateable premises and because of something to do with VAT which, frankly, I do not fully understand. For that reason they do not get the supports, but they need them and they face going under.

We will support the Bill, or at least not oppose it. The Government, however, needs to prevent an unnecessary debt burden by making some of those who can afford to do so pay their taxes. I refer to Apple but also to some in the corporate sector who have not suffered, even in this crisis. Certain sectors have done very well. I believe that corporate tax receipts have held up remarkably and surprisingly well because certain industries have not really been hit. The small guys - the people who have lost their jobs and their livelihoods - have been hit but some of the big corporations are actually doing well out of this crisis. They should make a solidarity contribution to the rest of society. We could finance some of the stimulus we need that way rather than just borrowing huge amounts of money and paying interest, directly or indirectly, probably to those very same people. We need to recognise the role of the public sector, public services and public infrastructure investment in terms of stimulus and not see this just in terms of the private sector. We need to support the people who are falling through the cracks.

Lastly, we need to make sure that all this support is linked to decent wages and conditions for workers and their trade union rights. There should be no question of giving support to entities that do not respect the rights of workers to be paid properly, have proper terms and conditions and be represented by the union or organisation of their choice. That is absolutely critical and should be a condition imposed on these stimulus supports.

See this speech in context