Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party) | Oireachtas source

Eight hundred and fifty thousand people amounts to a high percentage of the workforce, but it is a damning indictment of a low-wage economy. That is why workers are not in the tax net. The fact that the Minister does not think it significant enough to have a significant readjustment of income tax for 2014, in view of what is said to be 50,000 or 60,000 new jobs, suggests that he expects many of the new jobs to be in the low-income and precarious category.