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The Oxfam Davos Report published on January 18 got relatively little media coverage here and was buried after twenty-four hours. Yet its content is truly shocking, pointing to a world that is witnessing massive inequality and an ever-widening chasm in the wealth of the big majority of humanity as against that of a tiny elite. For the first time in history the wealth of the richest 1% is greater than the aggregated wealth of the remaining 99%. This should be a central feature in the current General Election campaign because it has huge ramifications for global developments that will impact on Ireland but also because chronic inequality is growing apace in this State also. You wouldn’t think that from the statements of the establishment political parties, nor from the issues emphasised by the big-business-owned media. In fact there is a concerted effort to not go there as seen in the controversy around the so-called ‘fiscal space’. The contrived debate on the fiscal space is really designed to shut down any meaningful discussion on what wealth exists here and how it should be shared and managed. It wants to confine commentary to the narrowest of parameters around an estimated €10 billion that will be available in extra public spending over the next five years based on assumptions of a certain level of economic growth. What this shuts out is any opening up of a debate on the massive wealth that exists outside of the current parameters of taxation policy and practice. Hence we have not only Fine Gael, Labour and Fianna Fail focusing obsessively on this, but Sinn Féin also chastising the other parties for being ‘irresponsible’ in their approach in exaggerating the amount available. Excluded therefore is any consideration of the €30 billion in extra wealth that the richest 300 in this State have garnered since 2010 according to the Sunday Independent Rich List while the majority groaned under the yoke of austerity. Excluded also are the massive profits reaped by big business including the major multinational corporations and the derisory tax that is levied on them. It is well known that the headline 12.5% corporation rate is but a vague target. It would be very generous to the corporations to say, as Eurostat figures do, that they pay an effective rate of 8.3% but if we were to take that as true, it would mean a very significant €2 billion each year could be raised if the headline were insisted on. Over five years that would immediately double the ‘fiscal space’. For every 1% increase after that there would be an extra annual €500 million for public investment and services. This is not even to take account of the work of Trinity College Associate Professor of Finance, Jim Stewart, who told an Oireachtas Subcommittee in 2014 that a massive €40 billion annual profits of Irish registered companies lies completely outside the tax net. The Anti Austerity Alliance Budget Statement from  October 2015 outlines how massively increased resources could be made available for major public investment in areas like social and affordable homes and greatly improved public services by taxing the real wealth that exists. Where these extra funds could be raised in addition to the corporation tax increased intake, would be a ‘millionaires’ tax on wealth, an increase in tax for individuals earning over €100,000 per year and a Financial Transactions Tax. Depending on the rates applied, extra income of up to €10 billion a year could be realised. In view of the Oxfam report and the growing inequality in Ireland itself the debate should urgently begin on national and international taxation policy and the massive shift of wealth from the 1% to the 99%. In the United States Bernie Sanders, describing himself as a democratic socialist, is generating major political waves and massive support among working people and the poor, with his call for a “‘political revolution”. The Left in Ireland is the only force that is attempting to inject similar ideas in to the election cam- paign here. If the electoral initiative of the Anti Austerity Alliance People Before Profit achieves the requisite seven Dáil deputies to form an official parliamentary group in the next Dáil, that debate can be significantly advanced here also. Joe Higgins TD is Campaign Manager for the Anti-Aus- terity Alliance. €40 billion annual profits of Irish registered companies lie completely outside the  tax net by Joe Higgins

Result: C kept core benefits but regressively reduced much else Jobseeker’s allowance, jobseeker’s benefit, the one-parent-family parent payment and disability benefit. are the key welfare payments provided by the State. They were reduced drastically between 2009 and 2011-12 and have been frozen since then. To restore these core welfare payments to their 2009 level, taking account of inflation, would require an increase of at least €27 per week for a single adult and €40 per week for a couple. Although core benefits have been maintained, almost everything else has been reduced. Up to Budget 2015 there have been four budgets, with a net reduction to the social protection budget of almost €900m. Of all the budgets, only one saw an expansion of welfare spending: Budget 2015 saw a €198m increase in welfare funding, still less than the €226m cut of the previous year. Overall, there has been a net reduction of spending on social welfare of 4.5% since Joan Burton took over. More generally, Budget 2016 was the fifth regressive Budget in a row. While it was not as regressive as in previous years and contained some gain for everyone, there was much more for the wealthier and far less for poor and vulnerable people.  While single unemployed people will gain €95 a year, single people earning €75,000 will gain almost ten times as much i.e. €902.  In the case of couples, the unemployed will gain €157 a year while a couple with two earners on €125,000 a year will gain nine times as much i.e. an extra €1,408 a year. Budget 2016 widened the rich-poor gap by €506 a year.  This measures the gap between the disposable income of a single unemployed person and a single person on €50,000 per annum. If compared with people on higher salaries the rich-poor gap has widened even more (cf. p.9)  The rich/poor gap has widened by €1,003 in two years as a result of this government’s budget decisions.  The reality of budget 2016 is that a single unemployed adult will gain €95 per annum, while a single person earning €75,000 per annum will gain €902. An unemployed couple will gain €157 per annum, while a couple jointly earning €125,000 per annum will gain €1,400 per annum. In 2012 under Pathways to Work labour-market ‘programmes’ (eg in-work benefits, job creation programmes, placement services, training and counselling) they were strengthened and made mandatory, and benefits were made more clearly dependentl on job-seeking efforts and engagement with social welfare services. Non-compliance of any sort can result in sanctions – a reduction of €44 per week or a cessation of payment for up to 9 weeks. For instance, refusing to take an internship can lead to this form of punishment. The Department of Social Protection has contracted two private companies to deliver JobPath.A British recruitment firm, Seetec, has been contracted to deliver these activation services in the north of the country and Dublin. An Turas Nua, a consortium of Irish-based recruitment company FRS and the UK company Working Links, will run the programme in the south of the country. It is understood that each contractor must service 25,000 long-term unemployed people a year in their search for employment. They will do this through a supply chain of sub-contracted local, private and not-for-profit, specialist organisations. We need more scrutiny on the motivations behind this decision and its possible consequences. The explicit driver for this partial privatisation of Irish public employment services is the inability of existing public services to support large numbers of long-term unemployed people back into the labour market.  However, we need to be mindful that, elsewhere, such privatisation has been at least partially motivated by the desire to implement sanctions-driven ‘pay by result’ regimes which many public-sector and not-for-profit organisations have been reluctant or unable to deliver. Activation policy now appears to be moving towards a ‘work first’ model that stresses job-search assistance with less emphasis on education and training. In many similar ‘work first’ and ‘pay by result’ régimes the most vulnerable of welfare claimants (people experiencing literacy, homelessness, addiction, domestic-violence, and mental health issues) are the most likely to experience sanctions. Activisation policies have been popular in the USA and Scandinavia since the 1970s; and have been warmly embraced by Merkel in Germany and Cameron in the UK. Report Card – Social Welfare

Result: D A poor vision that failed. Everyone who is ordinarily resident in the country has access to public hospital services, whether they have health insurance, a medical card or nothing at all. The services may not be free and may be subject to waiting times depending on medical condition. Without a medical card patients are charged €100 for all treatment received in a public hospital accident and emergency room, though a referral letter obviates the charge. A White Paper on Universal Health Insurance was published in 2014 with a report on the potential costs of the White Paper model published in November 2015. The debate was always too much about the cost of this rather than on how a focus on insurance might actually serve the presumed goal of universal healthcare. In the end Leo Varadkar suspended it, likening universal health insurance to Irish Water. He claimed it would have been impossible to impose the extra fees without a backlash from struggling families. While denying the Coalition had performed a U-turn on its central health policy, he was unable to give any specific year as to when a new version will be introduced. He also appeared to criticise his predecessor James Reilly by alleging there had been an “obsession” with the Dutch form of UHI. Varadkar insists the Coalition remains committed to introducing the policy at some unspecified stage in the future. The Irish health system ranks 21st in the 2015 Euro Health Consumer Index, up one place from 2014 but down from 14th in 2013. Lower-income countries such as Macedonia, Croatia and Slovenia all rank ahead of Ireland in the index, which is led by the Netherlands and Switzerland. And there has been a litany of specific scandals and failures that have characterised the media discourse on health. Or the consistent overspends. Enda Kenny says his greatest disappointment as Taoiseach is ongoing stories of people’s negative experience with the health services. Most of the health issues in the general election arise inevitably not from abstract policy but from crises and failures to address long-standing problems. Unfortunately for the government the public perception of the health service remains that it is a sort of dysfunctional “Angola”: Rebecca O’Malley, Susie Long, Leas Cross, Áras Attracta, Savita Halappanavar and ‘Grace’, the woman with intellectual disabilities who was tortured and sexually abused in a foster home over thirteen years. Worse still the proportion of the Irish population that was over the age of 65 has been static at 11% for years. But forecasts suggest that the percentage of people over the age of 65 will rise to 26% by 2026. About 20,000 additional people turn 65 each year and the actual number of people over that age will double in the next few decades. Within that the number of “older old”, people over the age of 80, will double. Minister for Health Leo Varadkar no longer repeats the 2011 election pledge to bring an end to the hospital trolley crisis. The Government should move towards a similar system to that of the UK where trolley counts are not relied upon to examine waiting times. Meanwhile, though there has been some marginal improvement since last year, overcrowded Emergency Departments (EDs), famously described by actor Brendan Gleeson in 2004 on the Late Late Show as “unspeakable… like a military field hospital… a disgrace… a war crime” continue to make it difficult for staff to fully examine and adequately treat patients, risking cross-infection and patient safety. There have been improvements in the number of emergency consultants (though problems subsist at weekends and nights) and the out-of-hours availability of GPs but the biggest problems are the maintenance of too many EDs (30 countrywide) and the under-resourcing of alternative primary care. Furthermore there has been for example no systematic introduction of minor-injury clinics, or deployment of techniques like acute medical assessment and early-discharge planning, no improvement in GPs’ access to diagnostics to enable them to avoid sending patients to hospitals, or improvement in hospital IT. Report Card – Health

Enda Kenny has defied those detractors who have claimed for many years that he is not up to the job of leading the country. Or has he? His supporters claim that he has brought the country, and the economy, from the brink of complete meltdown to steady recovery and is now set to be the first Fine Gael leader to claim the title of Taoiseach in successive elections. Others say that timing and luck have played a huge part in his belated success after more than 40 years in the Dáil and that victory in this month’s poll is by no means certain. Over the past five years, Kenny has displayed many of the characteristics that marked the career of his long-term adversary, Bertie Ahern, including the ability to shake off, or at least postpone, controversies that would have caused terminal damage to other party leaders. His claim to have secured a significant debt write-down from his EU partners in June 2012 proved to be untrue. His siding with the ECB and the Bundesbank against the struggling Greek people who put the radical leftists of Syriza into power was self-serving and opportunist and arguably undermined any prospect of Ireland getting some early relief on its enormous legacy of banking debt. His instruction to the Secretary General of the Department of Justice, Brian Purcell, to make a late-night visit to the Garda Commissioner, Martin Callinan, leading to the resignation of both senior public servants and of his own long -time supporter, Alan Shatter, in mid-2014, is all a fog of obfuscation. Similarly, the manner in which the Commission of Inquiry he announced to examine the purchase of Siteserv by long-time party supporter, Denis O’Brien, and other IBRC sales in mid-2015, was allowed to run into the sand due to its restricted powers and inadequate terms of reference bears all the finger prints of his senior handlers. His outrageous and inaccurate remarks from Davos to Madrid to Paris on Ireland’s crisis and his government’s role in recovery have confirmed that he has not lost the habit of appearing the clown, unintentionally, at the most unexpected moments. Enda Kenny also merits opprobrium for his broken promise to fix the health system, the failure to deal with a deepening housing crisis and the widening of the income divide between the richest and most vulnerable during these past few years. Yet the stars, and international factors, including a strong dollar and sterling, unpredicted multi-national tax payments and the dramatic oil-price collapse have combined to see Kenny emerge as the architect of the fastest-growing economy in Europe and the cheerful bestower of a fistful of promises to simultaneously cut taxes, improve public services and recruit thousands of nurses, teachers and gardaí. Kenny has luck on his side. He was fortunate to lose the leadership contest against Michael Noonan after John Bruton lost the 1997 general election to Ahern and before the 2002 poll when the Fine Gael vote imploded. Kenny survived with his lowest ever first preference vote in Mayo and Noonan resigned. The Mayo TD took over the party in June 2002 after a battle with Richard Bruton. Kenny was helped by transfers from his soon-to-be key ally, Phil Hogan, in the run-off and after the elimination of Jim Mitchell. He faced into the 2007 general election as the blitz of his bizarre financial arrangements threatened to take out Ahern but failed to convince voters that he could do better than Fianna Fáil in managing a faltering economy. Once again, luck was on Kenny’s side as Brian Cowen replaced Ahern a year later and was engulfed by the banking and property collapse. In 2011, after two failed heaves against him, the Fine Gael leader hauled his party to an historic victory and into government with a resurgent Labour Party, after the Fianna Fáil/ Green administration collapsed in acrimony and the people gave it an unprecedented battering in the February election. There is no doubt that he has rid himself of the ‘Bertie lite’ tag that dogged him for years, although his closest aides still do not trust him enough to let him out on his own too often. Kenny maintains a quirky, hail-fellow-wellmet style that makes him seem like a country bumpkin but disguises a more ruthless political streak and shrewdness.. In mid-2014, Kenny publicly distanced his Enda Kenny: not so lite now Luck, charm, good handlers and a ruthless streak make him the man to beat in election 2016 by Frank Connolly He merits opprobrium for his broken promise to fix the health system, the failure to deal with a deepening housing crisis and the widening of the income divide between the richest and most vulnerable during these past few years February 2016 19 party from its key strategist, and his close friend, Frank Flannery who was embroiled in a financial scandal which erupted after details emerged of enormous salaries and other payments involving the Rehab charity and its senior executives. Flannery who had left the charity some years previously was still being well paid by Rehab for consultancy work which involved lobbying his colleagues in Fine Gael. He had a pass for Leinster House and free parking which the public was informed was being removed. It was a humiliating experience for the suave PR man and no doubt difficult for Kenny. A few weeks later the pair sat down for lunch in Dobbins restaurant near the Dáil along with another old friend and party elder, the late Bill O’ Herlihy. Kenny expressed a degree of regret that Flannery had been shafted and was sorry that he had to withdraw his valuable Dáil pass. “Don’t worry about that, Enda”, replied Flannery, or words to that effect, as he pulled the pass from his jacket pocket, to laughter all round. Kenny never forgets his friends even when the going gets tough. Kenny was gifted a Dáil seat for Mayo west in November 1975 after the premature death of his father, Henry, from cancer. The