Mr. Seán Murphy:

In terms of data and research, I direct the Deputy to the Neumark and Wascher paper of 2007 which mentioned that a minimum wage rate will reduce employment if not set at a moderate rate. The OECD wrote the same in 1998, the World Bank did so in 2006 and there is also an IMF study from 2014 which indicated this fact. The IMF study made the point that youth employment in particular, which now is at the extraordinary level of 21%, will increase in the context of a minimum wage increase.

We should be aware of another issue. I attended the launch of the Government's tourism plan for the period 2015 to 2025 in Kilkenny yesterday where the Minister and the Taoiseach talked about our need to focus on cost. Do we honestly think that an increase in the minimum wage will not have a knock-on impact on everything ranging from hairdressing to child care? The latter issue of child care is one of the big issues that affects Irish society at present. Of course an increase will have an impact. We live in an era where the European Central Bank has embarked on a massive amount of quantitative easing to drive inflation because there is no inflation.

If anything, there is deflation when the cost of the decrease in the price of oil is taken into account. It has been suggested that those of us operating in a small and incredibly open economy should increase our costs. That is the context in which we would make this argument at the present time. I would point the committee to those papers.