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

I move amendment No. 10:

In page 11, after line 34, to insert the following: “11.Within three months of the passing of this Act, the Minister shall produce a report on abolishing the USC on all those earning less than €70,000 per year and replacing it with an emergency Covid-19 Solidarity Tax on the incomes of those earning in excess of €100,000 per year and on the profits of companies whose net profits exceed €1 million per year.”.

The amendment proposes the introduction of a Covid solidarity tax, in line with calls that are being made across the world for such taxes. Some jurisdictions are actually implementing Covid solidarity taxes to give real effect to the idea that we are all in it together. People Before Profit and Solidarity have for a very long time argued that there is a significant disparity in the distribution of income and wealth and that the gap between the rich and the poor in terms of income and wealth grows pretty much every year, year on year, has grown to really quite obscene levels in recent years and, even without Covid-19, needs to be addressed.

I know the Minister has read Capital in the Twenty-first Century by Thomas Piketty and therefore knows the argument but, in reality, it has not featured in the thinking of any Government since I was elected to the Dáil to think, as it heads into a budget, that one of the things it must do is to narrow the gap between rich and poor. I have never heard that feature as a budget priority. I have never heard a Minister for Finance get up on budget day and say it is a problem that the richest 10% of the population have 58% of the wealth or that the richest 1% have more wealth than the poorest 50%.That is just not deemed a problem. However, if one told any schoolchild that 1% of the population has more wealth than the poorest half of the population, I think that child would express disgust and say something should be done about it, that it is not fair, and would ask how that could be the case. Yet it is the case and the gap grows again and again, year on year.

However, along came Covid and, suddenly, in order to achieve the collective social action that was necessary to prevent Covid-19 overwhelming society, Governments were forced to come up with what could be a socialist slogan coined by Karl Marx or James Connolly - "We are all in it together".As people understood the threat of Covid-19, they bought into that slogan and the idea that people had to make sacrifices for the greater good, for the collective good, because we should all be in it together.

As all Members know, some people paid a very harsh price for Covid-19. Some people paid with their lives and others paid with severe illness. Some people paid with being worked to the bone on the front line of the health services. Some of those working to the bone in the health services, such as student nurses and midwives, were not getting paid at all for doing so. Some people lost their jobs and livelihoods because of the public measures they embraced with great commitment even though it meant significant economic sacrifice that continues even now for them and their families. Those working in certain sectors have not had a day's work since the measures were introduced in March, such as musicians and others in the arts and entertainment industry, those in the events sector and bar workers. Taxi drivers have had their incomes slaughtered and many of them have not worked since March because there is no work out there. All those people have really suffered in the collective effort fuelled by the belief that we are all in it together. Frankly, although the Government will say the supports provided are unprecedented, the lack of supports for many of those people will be felt significantly as we head into Christmas because their incomes are down.

However, some others have seen their incomes continue at a high level and the profits made by some of the wealthiest corporations have actually shot up. In the context of Covid and against the background of us all being in it together, if the Government did not accept before now it was time for a wealth tax in order to redistribute wealth for a greater level of equality, surely it would accept there is a case for doing that now when some people are going to enter into the Christmas period significantly impoverished by what has happened over the past year and is still happening, as well, maybe, if we were to take it a step further, to address the deep, growing and obscene structural inequalities in wealth and income.

We have had all the rhetoric about Covid being a milestone and threshold moment where we will go forward to a new type of normality, learn the lessons of the existential threat Covid has presented, identify new priorities around what is important and which workers are essential, and all the rest of it. If all of that is to mean anything and not just be hollow words that were used to elicit a bit of sacrifice from people, surely the time has come for a solidarity tax to be paid by the big and wealthy corporations and the very richest in our society in order to redistribute some of that wealth, income and profits to those who are suffering because of structural inequality and the particular hardships they have endured in the course of the Covid-19 crisis.

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