This week Oxfam published a report on the obscene amount of wealth in the hands of just a few. Ireland has the fifth largest number of billionaires in the world relative to its population. The world's ten richest men more than doubled their fortunes from $700 billion to $1.5 trillion. At the same time, the poorest workers and families in society have seen a drop in income. Those ten men now have six times more wealth than the poorest 3.1 billion people. Imagine, if we had a fair taxation system, what our health service, education and social welfare systems would look like. We could invest in climate change measures without hitting families and workers hardest. Has the Government any plans to introduce a genuine wealth tax?

We need to assess these reports and do a little more analysis of them. The Oxfam report claims that the wealth of Ireland's nine billionaires has increased by €18 billion to €49 billion since the start of the pandemic. The report admits that as Oxfam does not have data on individual wealth holdings, it makes estimates. It starts by making estimates of aggregate wealth based on measures like GDP, stock market values and national savings. These measures are very unlikely to produce reliable figures on wealth for Ireland. GDP is not a reliable indicator of income let alone wealth in Ireland. Neither is the price of, say, Ryanair stock, listed on the Irish stock market. Oxfam would then assume that the wealth is distributed in a particular way across the population. That is simply an assumption as it does not have comprehensive data on wealth distribution. Using this approach, for example, Oxfam claims that 18,350 people in Ireland are worth $5 million and above. It concludes that a flat 1.5% wealth tax on this cohort of wealth, above $5 million, would raise €4 billion. I am not sure if we can have any confidence in that figure, to be honest.

I point to an analysis of wealth taken by the Economic and Social Research Institute, ESRI, in 2016 which found that if the French wealth tax system was replicated in Ireland, the yield would only be €22 million.