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

I am sharing time with Deputies Barry and Paul Murphy.

The advent of Covid-19 has put Europe and the world at an existential crossroads. There have been a lot of woolly words of recognition about the need to move forward to a new normal, something different and better, and to learn the lessons of the Covid pandemic. However, I fear that a lot of that talk is rhetoric that masks an inclination simply to move as quickly as we can back to where we were before the advent of Covid. My fear is that we will fail to learn the lessons we should learn from the pandemic and the existential threat it poses to humanity.

One instance of that failure is the comment by the Taoiseach that he is not convinced about the need for a digital tax on corporations. That he needs convincing on this point gives the game away about the attitude of the Government to the Apple ruling and its commitment to large corporations that are flagrantly involved in aggressive tax avoidance for which the rest of society pays. This is not just an isolated case of trying to defend the particularities of Apple's aggressive tax avoidance because that company provides important jobs. The jobs in Cork are important, but the giveaway is that the Government does not just want to side with Apple over the tax dispute ahead of collecting taxes from the company that could go into funding jobs, infrastructure and services. The giveaway that this is not an isolated instance is the Taoiseach not being convinced about the need for a digital tax.

I do not understand how the Taoiseach can claim to be supportive of tax reform measures on an international level, in recognition that those corporations have grown bigger than states, are enormously profitable and are hoovering up vast amounts of the surplus wealth in the world, but not be in favour of imposing a little bit of tax on them to fund the services and infrastructures throughout Europe on which they depend. It is another example of how Ireland, in particular, is subservient at the feet of enormous multinational companies and does not recognise the need to move forward to a new normal where those corporations pay their fair share of tax.

This is important and relevant to the lessons of Covid because we have learned that if we do not fund our health services to the level where they are capable of dealing with surges of the sort we saw during the pandemic, the entire economy shuts down. That is what the famous curve is about. The level of healthcare capacity was too low to deal with surges. In the case of Ireland, it was too low even before Covid, when we were already operating at 100% capacity. If we do not address that capacity problem by taxing large and very profitable corporations to fund health services, childcare, education, water infrastructure and all of the areas that are deficient in investment, our economy will shut down at the first crisis it faces, as we have seen with Covid. If we do not recognise the need for a fundamental shift away from neoliberalism in the aftermath of Covid-19, we are heading for another disaster sooner or late, whether as a result of Covid, the next pandemic or another crisis. There needs to be a fundamental recognition of that, even in the July stimulus. It is not just about stimulating small and medium enterprises, which we have to do to sustain the jobs they provide. Unless we finance massive investment in key public services and infrastructure, we have an accident waiting to happen in this country and across Europe. I hope the European leaders and our new Taoiseach recognise the need for that change.

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