It’ll take a super human effort but we can rebuild

ONE of the more bizarre aspects of the Covid-19 crisis is the mural of chief medical officer Tony Holohan changing into a Superman suit on a Dublin pub. The most high-profile face of our health service is a new folk hero? Is this the same health service we’ve been lambasting since it was set up?

Fine Gael have surged in the polls to 36 per cent – up 15 points – with Leo Varadkar and Simon Harris performing particularly well. Is this the same party that lost a third of its seats since 2016?

My US cousin emailed me to say how envious she was that our leader is an actual doctor who rolls up his sleeves to battle Covid in scrubs, while she has Donald Trump.

The Government has generally done well in fighting Covid-19. The world has stopped spinning. Now, in this time of crisis, politicians are actually telling us the truth – and we respect them for it.

Simultaneously, while the financial costs are enormous, we have other positives in this battle too as fuel prices and interest rates have plunged to record lows recently.

In fact, we were able to borrow money at negative interest rates on Thursday. That’s right, investors paid us for the privilege of giving us money, which has never been so cheap.

As the Covid-19 numbers appear under control, these ‘positives’ will come in handy as focus switches to another challenging battle – how to save our economy and, especially, local businesses that are its lifeblood.

The Government can’t assume they will just bounce back as if nothing has happened. The crisis has exposed underlying economic cracks, some of which give an unfair advantage to the multinationals over our own local employers.

Now we need to level the playing field a bit.

Many, if not most, of our towns have been devastated by the rates burden on small shops, for example, while online retailers avoid this – and many other taxes – on a breathtaking scale.

Rates were initially suspended for two months. They should be written off – and reintroduced at a lower level as many councils want.

Local media, already struggling, have also laid off or cut the pay for thousands of workers.

In theory, your friendly local newspaper should have been able to migrate online and do well selling ads, at least during the good times, which would help tide it over during this crisis.

In practice, it has competition with the likes of Facebook and Google, which offer clients cheap ads and hundreds of pieces of information about you.

Online advertising can then be targeted with such chilling precision that we often feel like digital giants are listening in to our conversations.

Facebook competing for local advertising is like placing a shark in a rock pool. The little rockfish have no chance.

All this has wider repercussions. Digital media take little responsibility for the content they publish, unlike traditional news sources which are very careful for all sorts of reasons, including a centuries-old tradition of factual news reporting.

Donald Trump was elected by voters who, for the very first time, gleaned most of their news from the likes of Facebook and Twitter.

Little wonder that the US President gets away with such outlandish claims – to the despair of my American cousin! Digital giants also get away with treating consumers badly – and need to be taken to task for it.

Amazon had revenues of $75.4bn in the first three months of the year. It can easily afford to better police the companies it promotes and enables, many of which could do with proper vetting.

Digital giants also routinely and blatantly profit from advertising by scammers. You know the ones I mean: a celebrity is used against their wishes to promote a dodgy crypto currency or diet pill. Technology

companies should be treated the same as publishers and held more accountable not only for dubious online content – which they wash their hands of – but for fraudulent or misleading advertising too. For good measure, let’s slap a digital tax on them too.

This would also help raise money, preserve what’s left of our traditional media, and maybe help save us from electing a Donald Trump of our own.

The EU has proposed a single, common digital tax to stop the likes of Google and Facebook avoiding tax on their profits across the continent by shipping them to Ireland and saying they should be taxed here.

Fighting our ongoing and losing battle against this inevitable and just measure not only makes us look bad – it has merely led to most countries imposing even higher digital taxes of their own unilaterally.

We are set to lose anything from millions to billions in tax revenue

There are positives in this crisis, believe it or not, and we have to grab them while they are going

anyway due to this.

But we can get some of it back by charging a digital tax of our own.

Another option is a windfall tax on Covid-19 profits made by digital giants, which could be passed on to local media to help it survive, as the National Union of Journalists has suggested.

There’s no point in trying to suck up to these massive corporations. They are here because they save billions in tax. When that stops, they will leave, whatever we do. They really don’t care if we tug our forelocks to them or not – or whether we impose a tax that has negligible financial impact on their stupendous profits.

The Covid-19 crisis creates another unique chance to generate income – and political stability. Why not give the Greens their carbon tax measures? It can be done now at a much lower financial, social and political cost than previously.

Energy prices have plummeted so much in the shutdown that we would still pay less for fuel even with a carbon tax added on.

And with interest rates so low, we have a chance to kick-start whole new industries with climate-friendly investments that generate real local jobs.

As with most crises, this one comes with opportunities too.