Tommy Broughan (Dublin North East, Labour)
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I move:

That leave be granted to introduce a Bill entitled an Act to provide for the establishment of a High Pay and Wealth Commission on a permanent basis within the Central Statistics Office; to carry out research on levels of pay and wealth in the State; and to inform public policy in order to promote a fair distribution across society and provide for related matters.

The Taoiseach will be aware that the genesis of this Bill is the efforts in 2011, 2012 and 2013 of myself and other Independent and Opposition Deputies to present alternative budgets to the budgets of cuts and grave austerity. We, and the bodies on which we were relying, including the TASC research organisation, the OECD, believe there is a huge dearth of information in relation to income levels and wealth in this State. The proposed high pay commission would help to plug this information deficit by way of compiling the information necessary. It is hoped this commission would play a key role in beginning to address the problems associated with high pay, including high levels of executive pay. Only last Friday, I urged the Government not to approve the €1.5 million pay and benefits package to the Aer Lingus CEO, Christoph Mueller. I was grateful the Government did not support those outrageous pension increases for a company struggling to address a huge deficit in its pension fund on behalf of its workers. We also learned in recent weeks that the top ten best paid Irish CEOs shared €67 million between them. In fact, two of them shared almost €30 million between them. These are outrageous levels of remuneration for people running, in some cases, relatively modest sized companies.

This is at a time when young citizens are being forced to live on €5,000 per year. Lone parents are subject to progressive cuts to their incomes and elderly citizens have been subjected to terribly unfair cuts to home care packages, etc. Many hundreds of thousands of workers are living on the minimum wage, at €8.65 per hour, and often rely on very unjust zero-hour contracts.

Many societies are very concerned about the significant and rising levels of income inequality. Economist Paul Krugman, for example, refers to the Luxembourg Income Study Centre, which shows that primary income and assets are very unequally distributed in nearly all countries. Several IMF studies have shown that reducing income inequality through redistributive methods does not necessarily hurt economic growth.

The most talked about book on economics at present, which I am sure the Taoiseach is reading, is that of Professor Thomas Piketty, entitled "Capital in the Twenty-First Century". It makes a close study of the evolution of income and wealth in Europe in the past 300 years and covers the rise in wealth and income inequality, especially since the 1970s, and the Thatcherite governments. The associated ideology was promoted in this country by the Progressive Democrats, the Progressive Democrat Fianna Fáilers and, at times, the Taoiseach's own party. The book identifies the main driver of inequality as the tendency for the returns on capital to exceed the rate of economic growth. This is a central feature of capitalism and one of its great flaws.

In the United Kingdom, there is the High Pay Centre. In Australia in 2009, there was a public inquiry into executive high pay. Exorbitant levels of high executive pay in Ireland have not been tackled in any serious way, either in policy or legislation. We have heard the outcries about massively high pay in voluntary bodies. We all tend to know what public servants earn. I include ourselves, or everybody who works in this Chamber. However, there is a considerable range associated with the territory of high pay and wealth. We need to establish the facts and the data. The Taoiseach is the man who famously said, "Paddy likes to know." Paddy and Patricia do not know regarding high income and high wealth.

I propose that the high pay and wealth commission will engage in an executive pay project to establish a process whereby excessively high pay can be addressed at policy and legislative levels. Generating accurate information on the extent of high pay will be a key starting point for the commission. To some extent, this work has begun in a very tiny way, as the Taoiseach will probably know, in that the CSO was a member of the Household Finance and Consumption Network and is carrying out the household finance and consumption survey as part of its role. However, the survey is limited to only 5,000 households out of a couple of million. Introducing the Bill would be useful first step, therefore, as it would provide the basic data and information we need to formulate public and taxation policy.

Michael Kitt (Galway East, Fianna Fail)
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Is the Bill being opposed?

Enda Kenny (Mayo, Fine Gael)
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Certainly not. Deputy Broughan is a wonderful orator.

Michael Kitt (Galway East, Fianna Fail)
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Since this is a Private Members' Bill, Second Stage must, under Standing Orders, be taken in Private Members' time.

Tommy Broughan (Dublin North East, Labour)
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I move: "That the Bill be taken in Private Members' time."