Speaking at the Labour Women conference, Labour Party Deputy Leader, Joan Burton TD, insisted that those who have most must be called on to carry a fair share of the burden to get our public finances back in order.

“There is no doubt that the country faces an extraordinary difficult period ahead. Fianna Fáil has been in Government continuously for a period of 12 years. For a decade, they traded on their reputation for sound economic management. Since Brian Cowen graduated from being Minister for Finance to being Taoiseach the house of cards has finally come crashing down. As
evidenced by their support for NAMA, even the Greens have been contaminated with the same reckless abandon when it comes to the economy.

We are now being told in relation to NAMA and in relation to the hair-shirt Budget that these are TOGIT – ‘The Only Game in Town’. I want to say that the notion that the country should bet €54bn on NAMA without proper scrutiny and then brace itself for an unprecedented austerity budget is something that many women throughout the country, not to mention the men, find deeply worrying.

The key to the forthcoming budget is that any sacrifices that have to be made must start at the top. That means Ministers and senior civil servants must accept that their pay is seriously out of kilter with that of their counterparts in the European Union and in the US. Until the higher echelons of Irish public life show leadership by taking pay cuts, they cannot continue to preach austerity to everyone else.

I fundamentally disagree with the line being currently pedalled by the Minister for Finance, Brian Lenihan, that ‘there is no pot of gold’ in terms of revenue to be gained by closing down tax shelters and other devices which, in recent years, have been availed of by a small coterie of very wealthy people to reduce their tax liability to well below that of
ordinary workers.

The constant Fianna Fáil refrain that there is very little tax foregone by the state as a result of these tax and shelters for wealthy people, particularly those developed by Charlie McCreevy during his tenure as Minister for Finance, is just plain wrong. All the evidence proves otherwise. We have had a succession of tribunals and revenue enquiries
result in hundreds of millions in unpaid taxes being returned to the state.

And indeed, following these disclosures, there have been belated reforms of the tax code to ensure that people who are very wealthy and may even have a million-euro income do end up paying their fair share of tax.

Despite all of this, the most recent analysis published by the Department of Finance on the use by High Income Individuals of certain tax reliefs showed that nearly 4 in 5 people earning over half a million euro had an effective tax rate of less than 20%, while everyone earning between a quarter and a half million euro was able to use these specified reliefs to ensure they paid less than 20% in tax.

We don’t want high marginal rates of tax. The Minister is right when he says that the current marginal rate of tax, when you factor in levies and other taxes imposed in the most recent budget, at 52% is very high. There is little room to raise marginal rates of tax and there is certainly no desire on the part of the Labour Party to see marginal rates go back to the levels we saw in the 1980s. However, if we are to plug the hole in the public finances, then everybody is going to have to pay their fair share.

Under Fianna Fáil, taxes were for little people. High-rollers were feted with tax loopholes to beat the band leaving PAYE workers to bear the greatest burden.

It has been astonishingly evident during the worst of the financial crisis, the collapse of the property bubble and the collapse of the banks that women have been extremely conspicuous by their absence from the top table. On many occasions, I have been the only woman in attendance at key meetings.

It has become something of a cliché to suggest that perhaps if there were more women at senior levels in both the public in both banking and in the regulatory bodies that the culture of excessive risk taking which contributed in no small part to the crash would have been tempered.

There is a theory among economic sociologists that many women, being more concerned with nurturing and survival of infants, would have reacted in a less testosterone fuelled way than the mostly male bankers and developers did in the run up to Ireland’s little home grown crisis.

Just this week, Charles Goodhart, Professor of Finance at the London School of Economics, said that high-finance would benefit from a ‘little less of the Alpha male’. As a rule, men tend to be more aggressive and take more risks than women. To a large degree the financial crisis comes as a result of this testosterone culture of greed and recklessness. Certainly, finance would benefit from a much more equal participation by women at senior levels.

So far the response to the crisis by Fianna Fail appears to be just as male dominated with Taoiseach Brian Cowen and Minister for Finance, Brian Lenihan, extremely reluctant to acknowledge the catastrophic series of errors – the failure to supervise and regulate, the failure to take a realistic view of the building boom – have made the crisis in Ireland even
more painful. It is ironic, therefore, that in the current discussion about the forthcoming hair-shirt budget, cutting child benefit is seen as a soft option by policy makers and senior politicians alike.