One in every 100 Irish people is now a millionaire, even when the family home is excluded from the calculation. This is according to the latest edition of the Sunday Independent, writes Vincent Browne.
The newspaper also reported that Ireland now has six billionaires whose combined worth of €11 billion is equivalent to the gross domestic product of Jordan, which has a population of six million. These billionaires include Denis O'Brien, who personally made nearly a quarter of a billion arising from the sale of an asset he had been granted by the State a few years previously and who, immediately afterwards, became a tax exile.
They also include a restaurateur who made €400 million on property deals in the last few weeks; gambler and horse owner JP McManus; the reclusive singer Enya; the businessman and now Bupa owner Seán Quinn; Dermot Desmond, another of our tax exiles; members of the Roche family, who were elevated to the billionaire class by the sale of the West-Link toll bridge to the State for €600 million; and Tony O'Reilly (reverentially referred to by the Sunday Independent as Sir Anthony O'Reilly), yet another tax exile, who has made hundreds of millions from his various enterprises in this country, in part through speculation (as in Eircom) and in part through job-cutting (as in Independent Newspapers at present).
I think Seán Quinn is the only one of these billionaires who pays income tax in Ireland. The rest are resident in Monaco or Gibraltar or Portugal or Malta or the Bahamas or Switzerland or cyberspace.
The newspaper says one in every 100 Irish people is a millionaire - even if you exclude the value of the family home. A huge number of people who have become fabulously rich in the last decade have become rich not because of any great gifts they possess that have brought enhancement, financially, aesthetically or otherwise, to the rest of society, but because they are a dab hand at the property business.
In other words, vast tranches of our national wealth have been diverted to a small number of people, some of whom have contributed little to society, while the rest of society is relatively impoverished as a consequence.
And, to make matters worse, some of these have escaped the very lax redistributive mechanisms (ie the tax regime) that have sought to introduce a modicum of modest fairness by their "exile" in these foreign lands.
Meanwhile, nearly one in five people (18.5 per cent) are living on incomes of less than €11,000 for a single adult or less than €25,500 for two adults and two children, that is disposable income (income after tax, but including all social welfare benefits). To most of us who write for or read The Irish Times, the idea of a family of four living on less than €25,500 a year is inconceivable. Indeed, it must be for all our legislators as well, all of whom earn multiples of this. But more than three-quarter of a million (764,179) people in Ireland live on this income or its equivalent (ie less than €11,000 for an adult living alone, €14,600 for an adult and one child, a little over €18,000 in total for two adults living together). Were it not for social welfare payments, the number of people living below this base level would be far higher, about 40 per cent.
One-fifth of the three-quarters of a million people living on these miserable incomes or below it, are people at work. Only 10 per cent of them are unemployed. More than a quarter are on what is called "home duties", 10 per cent are retired, 10 per cent are disabled.
There is no willingness on the part of the political establishment to do anything about these huge inequities. None of the mainstream political parties is even addressing the issue.
Fianna Fáil and the PDs however have committed themselves to reducing what is called "consistent poverty". But they are unhappy with any talk about relative income poverty, which means they think it is okay for three-quarters of a million people to live on disposable incomes with the equivalent of less than €11,000 for an adult, while others are on incomes of millions and their TDs and Ministers are on incomes of 10 times that and more, much more in the case of Ministers.
People living in "consistent poverty" are those who have disposable incomes of less than 60 per cent of the median income and are deprived of one or more goods deemed essential for a basic standard of living.
In its National Plan for Social Inclusion 2007-2016, the present Government acknowledges that the "consistent poverty" rate is 7 per cent of the population. That is 290,000 people. And the proud promise of the present crew (FF and the PDs) is not to use the vast wealth we have accumulated these past 15 years to eliminate "consistent poverty", but to reduce it to between 2 per cent and 4 per cent by 2012. And no commitment at all on reducing the vast disparity in income and wealth generally.
For Fine Gael and Labour this is just fine too.
Vote them all out.
(NB: I am indebted to Cori for some of the data reproduced above.)