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

I am sharing time with Deputy Paul Murphy. I think the references to the frugal four or five, or even the stingy four or five, are too kind. These people are the hawks of austerity and neoliberalism. The fact that these hawks of neoliberalism and austerity have won a significant battle is indicated by the EU4Health budget, which was initially projected as being more than €9 billion, while after the negotiations concluded, it had been reduced to just over €1 billion. This EU4Health project was supposed to be the big response to Covid-19. The people who pushed for that and allowed that budget for health and the need for a dramatic response across Europe to a global health pandemic to be axed to almost nothing makes it clear that the people who run Europe have learned nothing from the pandemic that continues to grip Europe and threaten Europe and the world. They have learned less than nothing in deciding to axe that budget. That budget was for stockpiles of things such as ventilators, investing in and resourcing public health services across Europe and for early warning systems for pandemics. There was a brief moment in which they realised that we should change in response to Covid and then it was axed in favour of loans.

What is the difference between loans and grants? Loans are about us financing the recovery of Europe by borrowing from rich people and allowing rich people to profit from those loans. That is what borrowing is. Sometimes we imagine that borrowing is some sort of abstract activity. It is really borrowing from already rich people and paying them interest. The alternative is direct funding, funded by progressive taxation where the rich people pay some additional tax, perhaps a digital tax or a financial transaction tax, and we use that money to invest in things like health, housing, infrastructure, educational capacity and childcare.

That is the difference between loans and grants.

It is clear that the neoliberal hawks who favour austerity and who want to disarm us in the face of a global pandemic - they did it before with ten years of austerity - have won out. Our Government's claims to object to that agenda are completely undermined by the fact that we are the worst foot draggers when it comes to actually imposing taxes on these very wealthy interests that constantly avoid tax. We are the ones blocking and opposing digital taxes, we are the ones who do not want a financial transaction tax and we are the ones who act as a tax haven for some of the biggest tax avoiders and the most wealthy corporations in the world. Ireland's concern about the frugal five of austerity hawks is hollow in the extreme.

This is terribly important because all of it reflects on our July stimulus and what is coming up. All the discussion is about the stimulation of business. Do not get me wrong. A total of 1 million people depend on small and medium businesses for employment and we must absolutely protect and sustain those jobs. Why, however, do we not understand that investing in health, education, childcare and infrastructure is not just urgently required to deal with the post-Covid-19 world, it is a stimulus in itself? It is the basis of a sustainable and transformed economy in the post-Covid-19 world. It was needed for Covid-19 but now it is absolutely a matter of urgency to invest in a healthcare system, which means recruiting people so we can deal with Covid-19, to resource our education system, which is desperately overcrowded, to have a childcare system that works and to have a nursing home sector that works. This is a good thing for society and also an economic stimulus that is far more sustainable and which would move us to a more sustainable economic and social model.

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