A new study by the Combat Poverty Agency has found that income inequality has increased in Ireland during the 1990s. The report adds that this is one of the most unequal societies in Europe. The Agency has called on the Government to ensure that tax and welfare reforms in the budget redistribute resources to the least financially stable.
The state-funded agency launched the report on the "Distribution of Income in Ireland", which was written by a team from the Economic and Social Research Institute and NUI Maynooth. One of the authors, Brian Nolan of the ESRI, explained that, in the middle of the last decade, households at the bottom of the income ladder earned a larger share of the national income than they did at the end of the decade. Professor Nolan said that those in the middle and towards the top of the income ladder had benefited at a faster pace than those at the bottom.
He said that social welfare had less of an impact on inequality over the decade because fewer were getting welfare payments and their levels had lagged behind other incomes. He said that successive budgets in the past three years had favoured more affluent households. This, along with rising inflation and the scarcity of housing, indicated that the gap between those on lowest incomes and the rest of society was still widening.
The Director of Combat Poverty, Hugh Frazer, said that the challenge of Wednesday's budget was to reverse the pattern and ensure that tax and welfare reforms redistributed resources in favour of the least well-off.
