Eoin Hayes (Dublin Bay South, Social Democrats)

I thank the witnesses for coming in. There is a lot of preparation needed to get all the stuff together. Unfortunately I only got a chance to read it all as people were speaking; forgive me if I have not caught everything. Today's witnesses are the first representatives of workers we have had in front of us since the committee was set up in this Dáil. Perhaps that has been too long coming. I will make a few statements and ask for reactions to them. Hopefully I will get some more time to ask some more specific questions. A lot of the time, competitiveness becomes a question of costs of business. Dr. McDonnell is right in pointing out the other side of it, which is the question of worker productivity and how businesses harness that better. It is important to acknowledge that when Irish workers are given the chance to be highly productive, they actually are the most productive in the world, when we look at the multinational sector in particular. I am conscious as well that the management practices that have been rightly pointed out in the Irish indigenous sector and domestic economy are not actually keeping up. Anybody who has worked in a multinational and then gone to a non-multinational in Ireland would tell us that.

I agree with so much of what the witnesses are saying. The indigenous, domestic economy is our biggest issue when we think about the future economic model we should go towards. I am particularly concerned with taking a targeted approach versus dealing with some dead-weight issues. The high-potential start-up environment that was mentioned has been stagnant for the last two or three years in terms of the number of companies that are engaging in it. The research and development programme, the office of science and technology policy, its capital investment from this Department has gone down, as I pointed out a few weeks. There does not seem to be any vision for a State entrepreneurship model. On the regulatory environment, which we have to be supporting, while increased resources have been put into it there is no charter in the Department of enterprise to support large wage growth. That is a core concern for the cost of living for so many people. We have the most unequal market income in the developed world. This is especially difficult for people on lower incomes. Sometimes I think back to a video from years ago that Senator Elizabeth Warren made about what it means to be a business owner and to have an obligation to society. It means you are going to pay your taxes and have a good standard of living, but there is also an obligation to pay for those footpaths, to make sure the rest of society is properly educated. I think sometimes we forget about that side of the argument and forget to say that to business people.

On the other hand, there are real issues in some parts of the economy and with certain businesses. This targeted experimental approach is actually the way of doing it. I do not think anybody wants to see the café in Enniscrone or Claregalway shut down. They are the only social outlet for many people in those communities. However, for the restaurateur who took on too much high-risk debt in Dublin 2 and made too many bets, maybe actually creative destruction was playing the correct role in that instance. That would be in my constituency, not others. I think the export focus has to be a core part of how we think about this future economic model, and the management practices I talked about, particularly the technical skills that are required in AI. By way of anecdote, when I was eight or nine I was living in the US. We had to type up all our homework. I do not think anybody has to do that today, 20 or 30 years later, in Ireland. There is a real question there on technical skills and making them available to people. It is worth noting the question of lawyers and insurance companies that took on the IMF and won in this country. It is probably the only cohort in the entire country that won against the troika. Housing prices are driving wages. If the Government had done its job in the last ten years, we would not have this problem with major wage inflation. I really welcome the idea of a better environment for migrant workers. We do not talk enough about allowing people to work and the visa system I have been exposed to has just been unconscionable.

Going to some questions, for NERI, on this question of distribution of wages and wage growth, there is a reference in the paper to nominal wage growth versus real wage growth. I would like to get an understanding of how that plays out, what that distribution looks like and where the targeted worst parts of it are. Second, on the divergence of labour versus capital, I am acutely aware that our current taxation model is disproportionately focused on consumption and income and not sufficiently on capital, corporations, those who own property, assets and wealth. I would like to get an understanding of NERI's analysis of that. Last, on the lower employer social contributions----