Sir, –Joe McCarthy refers to what he perceives as "the political centre-right's inability to tackle Ireland's ever-burgeoning economic inequality" (Letters, January 27th). The Gini coefficient is the benchmark measure of economic inequality. It varies from zero, representing total equality, to one, a theoretical extreme where one individual has, or receives, all the assets. The relevant value for wealth in Ireland fell from 0.75 to 0.67 in the five years up to 2018. The value for income, meanwhile, fell from 31.8 to 29.7. In January 2020, the ESRI published a report under a headline stating that, "The Irish tax system does most in Europe to reduce inequality". Our extreme outlier status in this regard was also reported by the Economist, in April 2019. It might be worth asking what more our governments could possibly do in this regard. – Yours, etc,
BRIAN O’BRIEN,
Kinsale,
Co Cork.