Joan Collins (Dublin South Central, Independents 4 Change) | Oireachtas source

None of us on this side of the House can say that there are no measures in the budget which people will welcome. There is no doubt about that. It is very much the fundamentals I wish to deal with in respect of the budget and previous budgets. This is a budget to buy time for a broken system which the Government does not have the political will to fix. It is a budget which will increase inequality in this country.

Ireland, like almost every country in the world, has seen a massive transfer of wealth from the bottom of our society to the top over the past few decades. In Ireland today, two billionaires own 50% more wealth than the bottom half of this country's population. We should think on this and absorb it. This is not an accident but is a political decision made by successive governments to let the wealthy get away with not paying their fair share. This inequality is not just on wealth. We have a two-tier system in our country. Rather than funding and resourcing our public services properly, we have allowed a two-tier system to develop. Those who can afford to go private get proper services and those who cannot make do with a broken system. We have a two-tier healthcare system, a two-tier education system and two-tier mental health services. I could go on. If one is rich, this is a low-tax, high-service country. If one is not, it is a high-tax, low-service country. The Government continues to ask ordinary people to pay high taxes for public systems that are rapidly failing. Only 9% of people wanted tax cuts in this budget because people want services that actually work. Instead, in this budget, the Government has asked ordinary people to keep paying high taxes for a broken system where the wealthy see no real tax increases.

Research by the Nevin Institute found that the implicit tax rate in Ireland on workers is 15% above the EU average, whereas the rate on employers is 46% below the EU average. That is a shocking difference with regard to who pays for public services. It is a political choice to tax workers and employers completely outside of what is the norm in Europe. What is more, regressive taxes on consumption are above the EU average while our taxes on capital are less than half those in Germany, Denmark, Belgium, the UK or Italy, and less than a third that of France. That is a sign of the systematic taxing of ordinary workers more than the rich. The clearest example is in employer PRSI, where Ireland sits 27th in Europe for employers' contributions to social insurance. Employer PRSI is 44% of the European average. Increasing it to the European average and making it permanent would create €10 billion plus a year, which would be the same as we spend on education in this budget alone.

What I have described is a total distortion of how a modern state is supposed to fund itself. Wages in Spain are significantly lower than Ireland but it costs more to employ a Spanish worker because they are compensated more through public services.

We wonder why our public services are underfunded and failing when in comparison to the rest of Europe our wealthy pay far less than their fair share. If we followed the rest of Europe we would have more than €10 billion extra per year. How many hospital beds is that, how many houses or buses, and what improvements could we make in our public services, councils, communities and in our retrofitting projects with that? What we have seen since the neoliberal restructuring of our economy in the 1970s and 1980s is a massive transfer of wealth from the poorest to the richest. This has been allowed to happen completely unchecked by a tax system that allows those with the most money to pay the least. That is why we cannot afford to build hospitals or houses and why our services are under funded and falling apart.

Next week, section 39, section 56 and section 10 workers will go on strike. They will most likely be joined by those from section 38 and other service workers in the coming weeks. I fully support their actions. I know how difficult the decision to restrict desperately needed services is but the reality is that without this action, those services will continue to get worse. The Government has refused to engage in the WRC or pulled out of the talks. It has provided no money in this budget to improve wages or services in this sector. This is a perfect example of the choices this Government makes. It would rather allow the wealthy to get richer than pay our health, disability, youth and homeless service workers properly. During the austerity years, these were the low-hanging fruit that the Government went for in relation to cutting wages. These workers do not even have a pension as it stands. The workers in these sectors should be HSE employees rather than giving money and asking Enable Ireland and others to cut their cloth and pay their workers increases and pay parity.

We need to start to take back the wealth that has been transferred from the bottom of our society to the top. More than 30% of billionaires get their wealth from inheritance. This will only get worse. We need proper inheritance taxes to stop it.

There is a widening gap between the top 0.1% of society and everyone else. A global wealth tax on the world's millionaires, with 3% on those with wealth above $15 million and 5% on the world's billionaires would raise $1.7 trillion annually. We need to start that here and support it worldwide.

Our employers' PRSI contributions are 44% below the European average. They need to pay their fair share. We need to scrap our regressive consumption taxes and introduce progressive taxes on income and capital. At the very least, the Government needs to reverse its decision to tax landlords less than renters paying out-of-control, extortionate rents.

Inequality is not just a moral question. It is a direct cause of why our public services are failing and why people cannot find homes or afford to make ends meet. It is not that we cannot afford to build house or hospitals or fund our councils and services, it is that we can no longer afford to allow a billionaire class that does not pay its fair share. We can no longer afford to allow billionaires to get richer while more and more people are pushed into poverty.

Yesterday, I raised the point about energy poverty. The Society of St. Vincent de Paul says that 40% of homes are now in energy poverty. In an article by Mr. Charlie Weston last week the regulator of utilities said that one in eight homes is in arrears on their bills. These are the 38% of people in the poll at the weekend who do not have the €1,000 in savings to pay for emergencies. I am dealing with a woman on the pension, who has arrears of €1,200 which developed in the last year. She was given the option to pay off the arrears over 10 weeks at €120 per week in addition to paying her electricity bill. There are thousands of people like her. This has not been dealt with because one-off payments do not address those issues. Core payments address those issues; the core payments people get each week.

Regarding the health service, I am dealing with a woman who has been waiting for an operation in St. James's Hospital since 2019. In this day and age she has been waiting since 2019.

Those are the points we have to remember. This is the reality for many people and the Government's budget does not address it.

See this speech in context