Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

The way the Government goes on about this plan and has been lauding itself about this being the opposite of austerity and so on over the past 24 hours, one would think a massive new deal public investment was going on in the economy. The reality is very different. Look at the size of what we are talking about. The EU money and the domestic money adds up to €4.5 billion, which is a tiny amount. It is 1.5% of the size of the economy or 4% to 4.5% of the size of an annual budget. That is without going into the details of where the money is going. This is not a substantial package. Compared to an EU level per capita, it is about a quarter of public investment post-Covid spending in the Spanish state, for example.

What is contained in it? The Government can talk about the opposite of austerity all it wants. However, hundreds of thousands of people will experience, on one hand, a significant drop in their income of up of 40% for those on the €350 rate of PUP. They lose money in their pockets and will have to pay out more money in an austerity tax introduced in the aftermath of the last economic crisis. It will be difficult to convince those people that what the Government is doing is not austerity. They will experience it, correctly and accurately, as an attack on their living standards.

My second point is about the price we are paying for the corporate tax haven model, a failed and deeply unjust model. The way the Government often goes on, one would think someone else is paying the price for this, that it is a global competition and – nudge nudge, wink wink – it is the poorer countries which are losing out because hundreds of millions of euro are being robbed from the state coffers of poorer countries by the kind of practices this State engages in. However, they are not the only losers. We have made the point about the losers in terms of the money we do not get to invest in healthcare, education or to resolve the housing crisis.

The concrete point here is that the amount of money the State has got from the EU for this programme is very small compared to many other countries and that is because of our leprechaun economics. It is because it is based on GDP figures, which are massively bloated by corporations registering profits here to avoid paying tax. For example, we are getting about one sixth of what Croatia, a similar sized country, is getting. We are getting less than half of what Denmark, a similar sized country with a more developed economy, is getting. It underlines the point that ordinary workers here are the losers.

The Government keeps saying there is no alternative. We have an eco-socialist alternative. We have an eco-socialist green new deal, but the Government is not interested in discussing that.

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