Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I do not. It is not a case of me trying to pick figures to illustrate a particular argument. I am just trying to give an overall view of where our tax code is at the moment. I go back to a point I have emphasised a number of times here. If a person is on low levels of income in our society, his or her effective tax rate is substantially lower than someone who is a middle or high-income earner. In addition, because the amount of tax one is paying at present is far lower than in the past, income tax changes do not offer the kind of income growth that they did in the past as we took people out of the tax net. That is not a path I am going to go down again. What the Deputy is also missing in his analysis, if he is looking at the same table as me, is that for earlier income levels that table also takes account of the change in the minimum wage.