Ms Patricia Callan:

Deputy Kyne raised the possibility of a third tax rate. While it is all bad for domestic businesses, our arguments are based on balance. On balance, it makes more sense if we must look at social welfare rates which increased by double the rate of inflation in the past decade and are out of line with competitor countries internationally compared to increasing the top rate of tax, which may or may not bring in the amount of money that is bandied about but will certainly, from the perspective of the larger companies that are critical to smaller companies, deter investment entirely. Mobile investment will not come here if their top staff are taxed beyond what is the norm. That is the reality. We can philosophise about it, but on balance our assessment is that a third tier of tax would be detrimental to our overall competitiveness.

There was a discussion on the disincentive to work, be it from the level of social welfare payments or attitude. Our members tell me daily that even with schemes such as JobBridge there are more positions than applicants. It is staggering how few people are applying for the graduate training programme, the established programmes that are available. Whether that is because they think they will emigrate, we must communicate with people about these schemes. There is an appetite in the member companies to take on people, in particular under the JobBridge scheme and to work with Springboard graduates. We are not seeing the applications come through at any level. Even people offering real jobs are seeing very few and poor applications. The applicants may come in but they consider it is not worthwhile to take up the job. It may technically be worth their while but how much more do people have to make to make it worth their while to go and be productive?