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

Yes, sure. If the Deputy is sceptical and if he does not believe Oxfam, he should check out the Central Bank. It may be a source that the Deputy might consider more reliable. I believe Oxfam is very reliable. The Central Bank has started to produce something we have long asked for, which is figures on the distribution of wealth in this country. In its quarterly bulletins at the beginning of each year, the Central Bank has always shown the level of net wealth and assets in the country but has never shown the distribution. Essentially, we had to extrapolate from old studies on wealth distribution to work out what proportion of the wealth was in the hands of different deciles of our population. The Central Bank has confirmed with a report - from I believe the end of 2022 - what we, Oxfam and others have been saying for many years and the bank will do this on an ongoing basis. The report confirmed that the richest 10% of our population has approximately 54% of all of the wealth. This is massive. The net wealth in this country is now in excess of €1 trillion. One can do the maths. It is an extraordinary concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny group of people. This is the issue that needs to be addressed. There is more than enough wealth in Irish society to lift people out of poverty and to address many of the problems we have with the lack of resources for housing, infrastructure, amenities, and for decent pay and conditions for working people, many of whom have seen themselves hammered with the cost-of-living crisis over the past few years. The money is there but it is concentrated in the hands of a tiny few. Now we have the figures to back that up. A wealth tax could begin to address that and redistribute that wealth in a fair way.

As the Minister, Deputy Humphreys is present, I have a final couple of comments on the issue of addressing poverty and the immediacy of this. I was not aware of a particular issue, but have been made aware by a number of pensioners who have come to my clinic over the cold snap we are experiencing. There is a provision in the electricity credit measure, which is the €150 payments people have been getting off their electricity bills, whereby if the customer does not reach a certain threshold of electricity use, he or she does not get the payment. I was quite shocked because elderly people have come to me this week who had made sure their electricity use did not reach the €150 threshold because they could not afford to pay anything above it. They assumed they were going to get the €150 credit so they kept their use to just below €150 only to discover that because they had been economising on their use of electricity they were not getting the payment at all. That is pretty terrible. We can see how cold it is out there now and people who are cutting back on their use of electricity to heat their homes or for other uses of electricity are now not getting the payment precisely because they were cutting back as they could not afford it and were afraid of the prospects of using too much electricity. I believe if people do not get those credits, they do not get a lot of the other stuff as well. I ask the Government to immediately address this. It is just grossly unfair.

I have another ask of the Minister, which again is related to the cost of living and the cold snap and is to do with some of the additional payments the Government is giving to address the cost of living. I refer to the people who are on so called "short-term payments", although some of these payments are not that short term. If someone is on any of the short-term payments such as illness benefit, job seeker's allowance for less than nine months, the back-to-education allowance, the enterprise allowance and so on - and this is not an exhaustive list - he or she is not getting any of the additional once-off cost-of-living payments or fuel allowance. That is not right. Those people are on the same levels of low income as everybody who gets the payments, yet they have the same need to heat their homes in the cold snap in the winter and all the rest of it. Just because they are on a shorter-term payment, have just lost their job or are on a back-to-education scheme or an enterprise allowance scheme, they are having to go through this cold snap with all the extortionate cost-of-living increases and the inflation increases without the support of the once-off payments, the fuel allowance and so on that have been given to everybody else. That is not fair and in many cases that is actually penalising people for doing things like getting back into enterprise, trying to get to back to work, or trying to upskill themselves. Those who just happen to have lost their job recently and are no doubt trying to get back into it work are being penalised because they lost their job. That is not fair. I ask the Minister to address it and even at this late stage to give this cohort the payments that have been given to others.

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