EU Commission’s ruling merely highlights that economics-fetishising Ireland is not focused on social, environmental, cultural or transparency agendas

1 2 September 2016

EU Commission’s ruling merely highlights

that economics-fetishising Ireland is not

focused on social, environmental, cultural

or transparency agendas

by Michael Smith

26%

me arse thanks,

Apple

NEWS

September 2016 1 3

rish politics insincerely enmires itself in the need

for joined-up thinking, that ubiquitous cliché. But

it skirts around the best place for it: amalgamating

our erratic but once again soaring economic genius

with other more real agendas - making sure we

pursue ends and not just means, that we advance

social, environmental, cultural and transparency agen-

das. Quality of Life. Not just GDP, which measures,

according to Bobby Kennedy, “everything except that

which makes life worthwhile”.

Once in a while we get an insight into where our poli-

ticians stand on the economy and society. For example,

Enda Kenny’s principal vision is to make Ireland the best

little country in the world in which to do business.

That’s shocking dereliction for a country’s chief

visionmaker.

The only “absolute red line” issue in 2010 for the Min-

ister for Finance, Brian Lenihan, in international talks

about Ireland’s banking bailout was retaining Ireland’s

Corporation Tax Rate of 12.5%. Then-Tánaiste Mary

Coughlan conﬁrmed it was “non-negotiable”.

Similarly tax credits for research and Ireland’s 12.5

per cent corporation tax rate, were among the “red line

issues” for Ireland outlined by the Minister for Finance

Michael Noonan to an EU committee on taxation that

visited Dublin last year after the LuxLeaks tax-avoid-

ance scandal.

It is clear that petty red lines ﬂow in the blood of most

of our inestimably unimaginative leaders.

Not once has a government minister asserted that

social-welfare rates, income inequality, Traveller wel-

fare or quality-of-life indicators were any sort of red-line

factor. It’s always wheedling businesses and its horri-

ble corporation-tax rates.

Sometimes we see deference to corporations and

multinationals in a broader vista. There was Michael

Noonan’s ludicrous slurpings over a bovine Donald

Trump on a red carpet at Shannon on the promise of

some golf dollars to the peasants in Doonbeg. There’s

the silence on Shannon rendition ﬂights since ethical

objections to the warfare and kidnappings effected by

transient US troops using the airport as a base risk

attracting a spoonful of disapproval from our friends in

the headquarters of capitalism. There is our longstand-

ing deference to international pharma and the

inﬂationary effect this has on Irish medical costs,

because many of its purveyors have their EU headquar-

ters in Ireland.

But the most Orwellian moment in the history of tax

and the relationship between corporations and govern-

ments everywhere came at the end of August, courtesy

of the EU Commission’s ruling on Apple’s tax liabilities

to Ireland. It was pure Myles na Gopaleen.

The EU Commission of course dramatically ruled

against Apple, whose EU headquarters employing 6000

people is Cork. Apple paid an effective rate of tax on its

earnings in 2014 of 0.005% (not much). It has pulled off

the scam by ﬁlching proﬁts into a special 'stateless

company' with its headquarters in Ireland. Apple paid

the standard 12.5pc corporate tax on its Irish earnings

– indeed it is our biggest taxpayer – but it contrived

simply not to earn much in Ireland.

"The proﬁts did not have any factual or economic jus

tiﬁcation. The “head ofﬁce” had no employees, no

premises and no real activities," said Margrethe

Vestager, the EU spoilsport competition chief.

Paul Ryan, speaker of the US House of Representa-

tives – admittedly not the smartest guide, claimed:

“This is precisely the kind of unpredictable and heavy-

handed taxation that kills jobs and opportunity”.

Moving sharply to contradict himself he then pontiﬁ-

cated: “Above all, this is yet another reason why we

need to ﬁx our tax code. We need more American com-

panies to invest their money and create jobs right here

in the United States. Today’s decision should be a spur

to action”.

Perhaps indeed it should. But you'd think even Paul

Ryan would know that the action should be for people,

not for corporations.

The mishmash of national rules and bilateral treaties

that determine how much tax companies owe, and to

whom, is egregiously dated. It was designed for the

manufacturing age. Business today is increasingly digi-

tal, services-based and driven by intangible assets,

including rights to exploit intellectual property, from

patents to logos. These are easier than physical assets

to shift from subsidiaries in high-tax countries to those

in low-tax ones. Hence the relentless rise of tax plan-

ning as a fundament of multinationals’ greedball

business plans. The OECD conservatively reckons that

the resulting revenue losses to national exchequers

have grown to as much as $240 billion a year, or 10%

of global corporate income tax. The ethics of this are

revolting.

The growth of the likes of Apple, the world’s biggest

company by capitalisation, is at the expense of ordinary

people whose countries forego the beneﬁts of equita-

bly taxing them. The US’s 500 largest ﬁrms hold more

Enda Kenny’s principal vision is

to make Ireland the best little

country in the world in which to

do business. That’s shocking

dereliction for a country’s chief

visionmaker.

Slurping

1 4 September 2016

than $2tr in proﬁts offshore. Its tax laws

encourage this, because – to facilitate Ameri-

can corporate colonialism - profits its

companies make abroad are taxable in America

only when repatriated. Unless Donald Trump

comes to town.

Anyway the Commission wants Apple – with

perhaps (many) others to follow - to reimburse

Ireland for unpaid taxes of €13bn, plus interest

that might amount to another €6bn. That's

€2,600-€4,000 per head of population: far

more to the poor if equitably distributed.

This could change the country, beleaguered

after nearly a decade of austerity. It could take

a chunk off the national debt, which now stands

at €200 billion. It could pay a few years of the

Universal Social Charge (USC) which brings in

around €4bn a year annually.

It could put a rocket under the school build-

ing programme between 2016 and 2021

currently limited to capital of €2.8bn, intended

to deliver 310 major extension/refurbishment

projects and 14 new schools.

More enticingly still €13bn is the exact ﬁgure

budgeted for our health system this year. Or it

could pay more than twice over for the Govern-

ment’s Action Plan on Housing which commits

€5.5bn for building social housing and infra-

structure between now and 2021. The

government claims €5.5bn would fund 47,000

social houses and help to end long-term

homelessness.

So why do we hear so much about the need to

feed our economic side and so little about boost-

ing the stuff economics allows us to achieve.

The reason is that our politicians are captive

and deferential. And I mean you Trump-slurping

Michael Noonan. Twenty years ago as Minister

for Health he refused, on civil service and legal

advice, to grant signiﬁcant aid payments to vic-

tims of the State-occasioned Hep C

blood-contamination scandal and resisted Don-

egal mother Brigid McCole who was forced to

take court action for compensation but died

before she could beneﬁt. It had been forgotten

but for a decade the debacle was a byword for

a Minister, who knew better, favouring the

economy over morality and decency.

So what would we do with the Apple money

and, with or without it, how should we shift

politics?

NEWS

Freedom and

equality are poles.

All political activity

can be charted on

their axes

t is abhorrent that so much about a child’s

future is determined from the age of two, and

by its parents and background. My inclina-

tion is to compensate for this. That’s what I

mean by equality. Equality is the central politi-

cal value as it a human-on-human, relative one,

not focused on non-human means to ends like

capital in all its forms.

Equality Theory

Village goes on about the difference between

equality of opportunity, which is really free-

dom, and equality of outcome which

compensates for the accidents of birth. Free-

dom and equality are poles. All political activity

can be charted on their axes.

What Equality Means

A famous recent tome called ‘The Spirit Level’

documents a lot of the knock on effects of

equality and inequality, highlighting the "per-

nicious effects that inequality has on societies:

eroding trust, increasing anxiety and illness,

(and) encouraging excessive consumption". It

shows that for each of eleven different health

and social problems: physical health, mental

health, drug abuse, education, imprisonment,

obesity, social mobility, trust and community

life, violence, teenage pregnancies, and child

well-being, outcomes are signiﬁcantly worse in

more unequal rich countries”.

Taking physical health as the indicator, Ruth

Barrington, head of the Health Research Bureau

said, in 2007, that 5,400 people die here every

year because of deprivation. A report, ‘Poverty

is Bad for your Health’, claimed: "It has been

estimated that 5,400 fewer people would die

prematurely each year if death rates were

reduced to match those in Europe by tackling

social deprivation and inequalities". She based

this calculation on a report by the Institute of

Public Health, ‘Inequalities in Mortality’. Why

don’t we measure this stuff stringently and try

and change any scandalous phenomena it

points to? Why have we instead made GDP – a

measure which treats an oil-slick and its clean

up as a (desirable?) boost to growth – the prin-

cipal gauge of our success. And that’s leaving

aside the fact three quarters of the growth

was illusory, a confection of the per-

versions of a couple of unnamed

multinationals.

Anyway, using economic

wealth as a gauge of per

sonal fortune, unfortunately

in Ireland the top 1% owns

15% of wealth; the top 10%

owns 54% of wealth’ and the

top 20% owns 73%. The

share of gross pre-redistribu-

tion income going to the top one

per cent of earners increased from

34 per cent in 2011 to 39 per cent this year.

And over half of the increase in total income

(€21 billion) over the last ﬁve years has gone to

the top 10 per cent of earners. The bottom 50

per cent of earners got just six per cent of it.

We’re bad on wealth distribution; now quite so

bad on (post-tax) income distribution.

Towards the end of the boom and during the

downturn the Gini coefﬁcient, which measures

income equality, improved in Ireland, post-

redistribution – through direct taxation and

welfare. The effect of redistribution is much

less the case for example in the US where wel-

fare is more basic. Indeed of the 31 wealthy

countries included in an OECD analysis for

2009, Ireland had the highest level of inequal-

ity for direct income by some distance but

Ireland’s tax and transfer system, on the other

hand, had the biggest impact on reducing the

level of income inequality, putting us 17th out

of 31 countries and making us more equal than

the OECD average albeit by a narrow margin,

from the late noughties.

Having disimproved in the early years of the

boom from 30.2 in 2000 to 32.4 in 2005, income

inequality in Ireland has narrowed during the

economic crisis due to the protection of welfare

rates and middle-income earners shouldering

the burden of tax increases, according

to the ESRI. In 2011 and 2012 it was

31.1, falling to 30.0 in 2013. The

ratio in the UK is 38; and in

the US it is 42. However

there is no room for com-

placency as it leaves us

more unequal than we

were in 2000 and other

measures eg ﬁgures for

the top 10% of income

earners versus the bottom

10% of income earners – Gini

measures the ratio across the

board - and measures which on wealth,

not income, show more of a problem. According

to leftist think-tank, Tasc: “Wealth is highly

concentrated, with 72.7% of net wealth held by

the top 20% , which is higher than the Euro Area

average of 67.6%. The bottom half of the distri-

bution has around 5% of wealth (4.9%).

The top 10% have more than half of all the net

wealth in Ireland (53.8%). The Top 5% have

37.7% while the Top 1% has 14.8%

(In passing we may note that in 2014, Oxfam

reported that the 85 richest people in the world

have as much wealth as the 3.5 billion

poorest.)

The ﬁgures are also distorted as many of the

least provident simply emigrated. Extraordinar-

ily one in six of all those over the age of 15 who

were born in Ireland are living abroad and there

seems little sign this is changing.

EQUALITY AND A SOCIAL AGENDA

September 2016 1 5

SOCIAL PROBLEMS

reland’s July unemployment rate was 8.3. Youth unemployment

was 17.8 percent. The unemployment Rate in Ireland averaged

10.91 percent from 1983 until 2016, reaching an all time high of 17.3

percent in December of 1985 and a record low of 3.70 percent in

December of 2000.

The deprivation rate is still very high, at 31. The adult consistent

poverty rate was 7.9% in 2014 A recent report from UNICEF shows

30% of Irish children suffer from material deprivation, and lack

essential items

According to TASC the proportion of children living in consistent

poverty in Ireland almost doubled during the economic recession

from 6.3% in 2008 to 11.2% in 2014. This equates to 138,000 chil-

dren, or one in eight, living in consistent poverty. We have nothing

to be complacent about in terms of the material circumstances of our

population.

The most recent data showed there were more than 2000 children

in homeless accommodation in Dublin in August, up from 1275 last

August and 780 in January 2015.

At the end of June there were 38,000 mortgages in arrears more

than 720 days and 98000 or 13% in arrears. 50,000 debts have been

sold to unregulated private investors. Household debt was €148.5bn

at the end of March.

And there are 4000 asylum-seekers in direct provision with their

1000 court cases. awaiting decisions on their asylum applications in

shoddy accommodations, unable to work driven by the unethical goal

of policymakers is to deter asylum seekers from coming here in the

ﬁrst place. The numbers seeking refugee status here have fallen from

a high of 11,500 asylum applications in 2002 to fewer than 1,000 last

year.

Thankfully Ireland does not suffer from signiﬁcant racism: there

is, for example, no organised racialist organisation. Nearly one in

eight people living in Ireland comes from abroad, according to

research by Eurostat, 11.8 per cent of the population: Ireland had the

sixth highest proportion of foreign nationals. By contrast only 7.9%

of British are non-nationals.

As of 2014, Poles made up the largest grouping of non-nationals

in Ireland at 22 per cent (or 118,042), followed by British 21 per cent

(115,658); Lithuanians 7 per cent (35, 617) and Latvians (20, 086) and

Nigerians (19, 727) 4 per cent each.

So the equality statistics are important but in a centralised but

parochial society like Ireland’s they mask particular points of

dysfunctionality.

Towards the end of the boom

and during the downturn, the

Gini coefﬁcient, which measures

income equality, improved in

Ireland, post-redistribution

– through direct taxation

and welfare. The effect of

redistribution is much less the

case, for example, in the US

where welfare is more basic

ENVIRONMENT

he environment isn’t a vested interest so

it doesn’t rate as an issue for politicians

in Ireland. We emit twice as many green-

house-gas emissions as the Swedish per

head: at 16.7; the UK for example is at

10, while the EU average is 11 and Sweden’s

is down at 7.4. To put this in perspective the

US’s are 23 and Ethiopia‘s only one.

We throw tantrums for Irish exceptionalism

on climate change and have duly prevailed in

Europe which has now recognised the special

position of Irish agriculture, the biggest sec-

toral emitter largely because of ﬂatulent cows,

in European climate-change policy. We’re not

and we did not deserve to get any exemptions

at all. We’re rich. If cattle farming is noxious,

the world needs to stop it, not allow more of it

to happen in Ireland which does it marginally

less noxiously than most others. If we want to

save humanity we’ve to eat fewer burgers.

Though of course we don’t.

According to the Environmental Protection

Agency (EPA (2014) the majority of Ireland’s

most important habitats are reported to be

poor or bad conservation status, including

raised and blanket bogs, dune systems, oligo-

trophic lakes, fens and mires, natural

grasslands and woodlands. Many protected

species have favourable conservation status

but certain species, particularly of wetland

and freshwater environments, such as the

Atlantic salmon and freshwater pearl mussel

are reported to be of bad conservation status.

A recent Birdwatch Ireland assessment of

the population status of Ireland’s birds indi-

cates that of the 199 species assessed, 25

were placed on the red list (i.e. of most con-

servation concern). There is evidence that

some species are still undergoing signiﬁcant

declines (e.g. kestrel and skylark) or have

become extinct in Ireland (corn bunting).

An anecdote illustrates the disengagement

of the political classes. At a dinner for busi-

ness-people last year, then environment

Minister, Labour’s Alan Kelly, was engaged by

1 6 September 2016

NEWS

ENVIRONMENT (continued)

a Green Party spokesperson who sat next to

him but whom he did not recognise. The con-

versation turned to climate change and the

Minister grew increasingly frustrated and then

furious at the tenor of the criticism. Eventually,

he told the spokesperson to “get out of my

face!”. Subsequently, one of Kelly’s handlers

approached, to advise that whatever she

wanted, the Department would be doing the

opposite. Simon Coveney is no better. A long-

standing panderer to Irish agriculture, he is

about to send central Dublin down a dead end

of character-destroying high-rise

development. He simply doesn’t care enough

to think expansively or independently.

More generally it is shocking that while cli-

mate change is beginning to register among

the chattering classes there is little awareness

that 50 percent of wild animals have disap-

peared over the last forty years. The number

of wild animals on Earth – vertebrates - has

halved in the past 40 years. If half the animals

died in the zoo it would be front page news.

Half the planet dies and it’s dreary negativity.

Let’s talk about the Rose of Tralee.

We emit twice as

many greenhouse-gas

emissions as the Swedish

per head: at 16.7; the UK

for example is at 10,while

the EU average is 11

ithout good governance we can’t

guarantee that any of the agendas we

need will be delivered.

OVER-CENTRALISATION

We’re too centralised. We have no directly

elected mayors and the number of councillors

has reduced since the downturn from 1627 to

949. There is little accountability for local

expenditure. The proceeds of the property

tax are not really put into local services.

CORRUPTION

As to corruption the truth about the tribunals

is that they rarely nail the culprits. From the

Beef Inquiry, let down by a compromised

chairman; to the Mahon Tribunal which

unduly and arbitrarily relied on the evidence

of the unreliable Gogarty and Dunlop; to the

Moriarty Tribunal which pulled its punches

after a half-cocked interim report and assault

by Denis O’Brien; to the Smithwick Tribunal

which changed its mind about the identity of

the key colluder; to the Ansbacher cover-up,

an investigation into which has run dry again;

to a number of Banking Inquiries which didn’t

call key witnesses, they haven’t had the

means to ﬁnd out who is telling the truth and

often rely arbitrarily on witnesses.

Two tribunal reports - Mahon and Moriarty

- made precise recommendations as to ethics

in government. They largely overlapped. Gov-

ernment claimed some years ago that almost

half (29) of the 64 recommendations made by

the Mahon tribunal have already been imple-

mented or are in the process of being

implemented. If anyone had the energy

they’d second-guess that, but I’d estimate

the ﬁgure as closer to half of what they claim,

with most of the important ones ignored.

TRANSPARENCY

Ireland slipped one place on Transparency

International’s Corruption Perceptions [as

opposed to Corruption Reality] Index for

2015. The ﬁndings showed a fall in Ireland’s

ranking since 2014 from 17 to 18 out of 168

countries, but a slight improvement in its

score from 74 to 75 out of 100. Transparency

International considered the failure to pub-

lish new anti-corruption legislation, four

years after it was announced, was hugely

disappointing.

The last government did advance the Free-

dom of Information, lobbying and

whistleblower regimes. Whistleblower legisla-

tion was introduced this year embracing

workers in all sectors. And lobbying legislation

though it only guarantees to record that meet-

ings took place not what was said; and

establishes cooling off periods for ofﬁcials

before they go into private-sector jobs of only

a year, not the two years originally promised.

POLITICAL FUNDING

Political funding has massively changed,

with much now coming from uncorrupting

government funds. Nevertheless for example

the Mahon tribunal recommended that the

threshold over which political donations

should be disclosed should be reduced to €55

for individual candidates and €175 for par-

ties. In fact Government reduced these limits

to €600 and €1,500 respectively. Ten times

more.

The independence of the Revenue Commis-

sioners has been placed on a statutory basis,

and the Central Bank’s regulatory powers

have been enhanced.

There also appears to be reduced tolerance

for nepotism though as a country we appear

still to have no particular problem with paro-

chial improprieties such as Councillor-driven

planning permissions and Garda favours.

MEDIA OWNERSHIP

Denis O’Brien is Ireland’s most powerful

media owner and richest man and a big sup-

porter of the main governing party FG ,and

mate of Bill Clinton. The Moriarty Tribunal,

which was instigated after the Planning Tri-

bunal to look into political corruption found

that, Communications Minister, Michael

GOVERNANCE

PLANNING

ven after the publication of the Mahon Tribunal report and its

ﬁndings of systematic corruption, Penrose’s successor Jan

O’Sullivan was unmoved, describing criticisms of a cover-up as

a smokescreen. It took a High Court case, by former Donegal Planner

Gerard Convie, to force the government into a u-turn.

After the RTÉ Investigates programme which uncovered extraor-

dinary dodginess in planning last year, the government sheepishly

announced a package of ‘radical’ planning measures which included

the belated publication of the independent review, further rehashed

details on the proposed Ofﬁce of the Planning Regulator (the major

recommendation of the Mahon Tribunal) and a ‘roadmap’ for the

forthcoming National Planning Framework (NPF). The independent

review uncovered considerable evidence of malpractice throughout

the planning system and includes 29 recommendations to improve

“standards of transparency, consistency and accountability” which

the Department says it will implement.

September 2016 1 7

GDP (Constant prices, SA), €m 52,573

GNP (Constant prices, SA), €m 44,124

General government surplus/deﬁcit as a % of GDP -3.1

Gross General government debt as a % of annualised GDP 93.8

Numbers in employment, 000 1,976.5

Unemployment rate (SA), % 7.8

Numbers on Live Register (SA), 000 309.2

Average weekly earnings, € 707.99

Consumer price index, December 2011=100 101.9

CSO Figures - Irish Economy 2016

Lowry a self-righteous Fine Gael who was

excitingly beholden to Ben Dunne, a super

market mogul with a cocaine habit, assisted

Denis O'Brien's consortium Esat Digiphone in

acquiring Ireland’s lucrative second mobile

phone licence in the mid-1990s This ulti

mately made O'Brien the richest man in

Ireland. At an infamous meeting in Hartigan’s

a grubby bar off Stephen’s Green in Dublin,

Lowry tipped O’Brien off as to how to secure

the bid.

The Moriarty Tribunal noted that O'Brien had

“made or facilitated three payments to Lowry,

the deciding Minister, of around $1m: £147,000

sterling, £300,000 sterling and a beneﬁt equiv-

alent to a payment in the form of O'Brien's

support for a loan of £420,000 sterling”.

O’Brien now has nearly 30% of INM, the

Independent Newspaper group Ireland’s big-

gest newspaper group, though he denies he

controls it; and owns several radio stations.

In 2013, I wrote in Village that Denis O’Brien

was exercising an extraordinarily chilling

effect on journalists. I detailed his litigious

“promiscuity”. The ﬁrst six journalists I spoke

to for a proﬁle of him, big beasts in Ireland’s

world of journalism, wouldn’t comment on him

for fear of litigation, for fear of having their

careers damaged as happened to several..

Although O’Brien at one state informed Vil-

lage that “I take very serious objection to the

use of the word ‘corruption’ Village has always

taken the line that you can say Denis O’Brien

was corrupt. However, spineless Irish media

had chosen to learn an entirely different

lesson: Not to mention that, or him!

Onto this lethal deferential background

then came the decision of one of Ireland’s

soberest TDs, Independent Catherine Murphy,

last year to read details not of that impropriety

but of Denis O’Brien’s banking arrangements

with State-owned IBRC into the parliamen-

tary record. She claimed he was getting an

interest rate of 1.25% when the state-owned

successor to Anglo Irish Bank which held his

loans was charging everyone else 7.5%.

Because she said it in parliament the matter

is constitutionally protected. The constitution

is clear.

When Murphy raised it in the Dáil, lawyers

acting for O'Brien immediately demanded the

country's media censor reporting the parlia-

mentary of proceedings. Following poor legal

advice RTE, the national broadcaster, the Irish

Times and of course The Irish Independent

Group, arguably controlled by O’Brien, com-

plicitly did not report on this. I noted that

when the legal advice was inevitably found

by the High Court to be nonsense their bosses

should resign. But it was; and they didn’t.

O’Brien also incidentally extracted an apol-

ogy from IMN in 2015 for saying he controlled

it. Which sort of proved the point that he half

did. And that ‘Independent Newspapers’ is an

oxymoron.

The media in Ireland are not safe, not

democratic.

ecent CSO ﬁgures showing the Irish

economy grew by a massive 26pc last

year - more than three times faster

than ﬁrst thought - were quickly dismissed

as "farcical" at home and abroad. Nobel

Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman

described the phenomenon as "Leprechaun

economics", as experts lined up to explain

why the ﬁgure doesn't reﬂect reality.

Nevertheless the debt mountain built up

paying off bank debts and funding the cur-

rent deﬁcit in the years of austerity is

shrinking. Soon it will look almost normal by

European standards.

Ireland is predicted to be the fastest-grow-

ing economy in Europe this year according to

new ﬁgures from the European Commission,

with the EU’s executive arm expecting the

economy to grow by 4.9 per cent this year –

not 26%.

The predicted GDP growth rate is higher

than the ﬁgure of 4.5 per cent for 2016 esti-

mated four months ago. The Commission

also revised upwards its estimates for 2017

to 3.7 per cent, up slightly from the growth

rate of 3.5 per cent predicted in February.

The 4.9 per cent GDP growth rate con-

trasts with the euro zone average of 1.6 per

cent growth expected this year, down slightly

from the 1.7 per cent growth forecast in Feb-

ruary. Germany, Europe’s largest economy,

is expected to grow by 1.6 per cent in 2016

with a 1.3 per cent growth rate expected for

France. The deﬁcit – which at one point

soared to 30 per cent of GDP but which was

for a long time over 10 per cent – will shrink

to less than 1 per cent this year.

We could be facing a €13 - €19bn boost to

our public ﬁnances. There is palpably scope

for radical social action.

olitics is of course the agencys for these

agendas: for balancing the rest of them

against vested economic agendas and

so-called imperatives. The extent to which the

priority has shifted from tax cuts to public

spending increases was evident from a recent

claim by Minister for Finance Michael Noonan

that about 85 per cent of available extra

resources this year was going to extra public

spending rather than tax cuts.

The Government remains committed to

whittling away at USC for lower and

middle-income earners over the coming years.

But it seems it is a lot more committed to more

spending on public services. Noonan speaks

repeatedly of investment in “schools and hos-

pitals” on Tuesday. Largely absent has been

the emphasis more customary from Fine Gael

in recent years about “putting money back

into people’s pockets”.

Noonan recently told Sean O’Rourke:

“Governments govern from the centre if

they’re doing their job properly. And some

times depending on conditions they have to

veer to the right sometimes they have to veer

to the left. And if you think a simple model for

left and right whether you spend more or you

don’t spend more.

This government is moving left of centre

because we know that public services have

been very damaged and we didn’t invest in

them over the last ﬁve years simply because

we didn’t have the money. Well we have the

money now and we’re going to do it".

The Apple debacle shows the need for acute

scepticism, and mobilisation.

ECONOMY

POLITICS

The proportion of children

living in consistent poverty in

Ireland almost doubled during

the economic recession from

6.3% in 2008 to 11.2% in 2014